What a wonderful day. We now have twelve wheels safely on martian soil. I've said since the very beginning of this thing that there were six terrifying events over the course of this mission... two launches, two landings, and two egresses. All six of those are behind us now. We have two healthy rovers, each with completely healthy payloads, on the surface of Mars and ready to explore.
We also have a whole bunch of hematite at Meridiani! The first Mini-TES results are in, and we've got a slam-dunk identification of hematite in the gray soil granules around the lander. This spectrum shows a laboratory spectrum of hematite (the red curve) and a Mini-TES spectrum of the dark soil near the lander (the yellow curve). The close match of the up-and-down lines at the right end of the plot is what tells us we've definitely found the hematite.
There's lots more news to tell, but a bunch of people are about to head out to celebrate (at 7:00 AM Pacific time!)and I'm going to join them...
