National Aeronautics and Space Administration

“ Seeing warm and cold blobs passing over the rover down near the surface. We think that the ground is warming, transmitting heat to atmosphere, warm rises and goes up to 100 meters and gives its heat up to the rest of the atmosphere and then there's a cold blob that comes down. You're watching the boiling of the atmosphere. It's really convection. This is really exciting data that will allow us to much better constrain the models that were used to understand the winds that were a danger at the landing sites. ”

“ Children learning about rocks on Earth and rocks on Mars. Tying in to the students' curriculum. We have a program called rover quest which are classroom activities that follow along with the rover, the science discoveries, authentic data. Cooler than just a textbook lesson. We have some specific examples. First slide shows the Mars Exploration Student Data Team using the orbiters, Odyssey and MGS, 25 states involved, looking at landing sites, characterizing the weather, etc, real science in real time, amazing experience, the real stuff, real science, in real time. ”

“ Current big picture plan to drive to Bonneville crater 340 meters away. We have started the drive and completed approximately 58 meters of that traverse. 3 successful sol drives. Sol 36 we did 6 meter drive. On sol 37 we did 27 meter drive and I'd like to show a movie on the Hazcam as we performed that drive. Snapshots, not realtime, much faster than we go. We're also taking a bunch of images and making a goodness map which tells us where it's safe to traverse. This second video shows colors, green and yellow are safe, orange and red are areas the rover will want to avoid. ”