Regarding the crater names, it does appear that Epsilon is Emma Dean, since the yellow line on a previously posted travel map "sideswipes" Epsilon, and that line so far remains pretty close to the route travelled to this point.

Vicky I (Chryse Plantia) and Vicky II (Isidis Plantia)

The Meridiani Planum is like a dessert place as to the Earth. That place has so few boulders if we compare to the others places as seen by Vicky I (Chryse Plantia) and Vicky II (Isidis Plantia) and Pathfinder (Vallis Ares). That lead me to think that Meridiani had a very slow water flux or fewer water when comparing to the Vicky and Pathfinder places. These places had left big stones which might mean that place had a strong or much current of water which had eroded the land and left big boulders and stones.

What the rover needs to survive in winter is something between 200 and 250 watt-hours, whereas now we can survive on something less than 200 watt-hours, so even with relatively low power numbers we're able to safely operate the vehicle and get lots done," Squyres explained.

On the other side of Good Hope is a fairly wide bay that is not yet named, but it is "an interesting bay for a couple of reasons," he noted. "It is one of the bays that looks from preliminary data to have one of the more shallow slopes and may be a third possibility after Duck Bay and Bottomless Bay that would give us entrée into Victoria."

Once that assignment is done, Opportunity has a full slate ahead. "We had a wonderful planning session [Wednesday] and we've actually got a plan that extends considerably into the future now for Opportunity," Squyres reported. "The next step after characterizing the slopes is to drive right into one of those dark streaks that emanate from a couple of these alcoves. We want to drive into them and find out what they are. We will drive into the darkest spot of the darkest dark streak and try to find out what's going on there."

After that, Squyres said the plan for Opportunity is to follow the dark streak back to its source at the rim of the crater, do some work there, then drive out onto the next promontory, named Tierra del Fuego, and take picture of the eastern face of Cape St. Vincent. [The area (bay) between Cape St. Vincent and Tierra del Fuego is still not named.]

"After all that, we'll be ready to try entering Victoria crater," Squyres said. "We've got two candidates. One possibility is that we'll do a toe-dip in the Valley Without Peril and do some imaging of cliff faces." That, of course, is why the rover is spending quality time imaging the Valley's slopes. "But we have to see these images first to see if the Valley Without Peril lives up to its name or not and verify that it is safe. We would not be in there for long." There is, however, "a significant probability" Opportunity won't venture in at the Valley Without Peril. "Either way, once the work is done in this area, we're going to scoot at high speed back to Duck Bay," he added. "That's where we're going to go in."

The newly-revised plan means the rover will not be going all the way around Victoria's rim – at least not at this juncture. "What we're going to do after we finish our work inside the crater is to be determined," Squyres said. "We have several possibilities – continuing the circumnavigation by egressing out of the crater and going counter-clockwise, spending time looking at cobbles on the plains, or driving up to another crater, and we have several candidates for those."

But that is when. For now, the science team is anxious to get on with the exploration of the interior of the crater. "Exploring the interior of Victoria crater requires a completely healthy mobility system with 6 good wheels," noted Squyres. "We could traverse along the rim with 5 wheels just fine and we could drive to other craters, but the one thing we cannot do with 5 wheels is explore the interior of this crater, because it's too steep. We have 6 good wheels now, but will we in 6 months? I don't know. Therefore, we are strongly motivated to explore the interior as soon as we can while the vehicle health is still excellent."

I'm sure most of you caught the slip in the image titled "No hematite?"

"We were doing just a standard IDD unstow and it stopped part way through the unstow process. It scared the living daylights out of us, because this IDD is the one with the problem with the shoulder," recalled Squyres. "We thought something terrible might have happened."

It turned out to be an obscure "angle 360 wrapping" bug.

The only way to get rid of the dust is to let it slowly settle out. A typical rate, Lemmon said, is something like one percent a day. "So even if all the storms on Mars shut down today, you're talking about two or three months before you're back to normal levels."

If Mars wasn't enough of a challenge, the rovers are now facing a death threat down here on Earth, as a bill wending its way through the Senate threatens to shut down the rovers and pull the funding plug. It's part of the continued budget cuts from the science programs at NASA to fund the return to the Moon announced by Pres. Bush in January 2004 as part of his new Vision for Space Exploration.

"It's cooler by 10 to 20 degrees Celsius [50 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit]

In reflecting on the last several weeks, Squyres typically put things in perspective. "No one's ever known what it's like to be in one of these storms," he said. "We're lucky we've lasted long enough to experience this. We may come out the other side and we may not. If we do come through the other side -- okay, it's going to be one more phenomenal accomplishment for the mission. If we don't, well, this is one of the two acceptable ways for the rovers to go."

Squyres was leading a team to test out past and present life-seeking instruments for future Mars rovers on NASA's Arctic Mars Analog Svalbard Expedition and facing "some very challenging conditions," as he put it. "In 10 years of doing rover field tests, it turned out to be the first time I've had a command approval meeting interrupted by a polar bear," he elaborated. The humans stood down, the bear was diverted from the test rovers, and Squyres returned to his Cornell University MER base in one piece earlier this week.

Bell said he was hoping they could figure out a way to use these calibrated images to generate the JPEGs that go out to the public every day, so that those who are working to make their own mosaics or are otherwise working with the images on their own don't have to completely re-invent this wheel. Stay tuned for that.