In your face Phoenix! While the lately-landed lander is busying itself scraping for ice, old-timer rover Opportunity has been taking some amazing photos; which so far have only had limited press coverage, but really merit a bigger splash.

The ever-anthropomorphised rover has sidled up to a cliff face in Victoria Crater and is tilting its camera skywards. Is this just an attention-seeking ploy now that kid-brother (sister?) Phoenix is showing off finding signs of water ice, and testing the soil, blah blah blah?

I don’t doubt that NASA will be shouting loudly about these images, which as yet have only made it into the raw data files on the Phoenix mission’s web pages. Perhaps they’re going to wait until the rover has nosed closer to the bottom of the cliff and got a better view. The plan seems to be to take some close-up shots of the rocks and see what kind of structure they have, geologically. Coupled with the data that Phoenix is digging up, further north, it looks like Mars is going to be spewing up data for us to devour for a while yet.

(Another great picture below the fold.)