Meanwhile, up on Mars… while Spirit flounces around in the sand, Opportunity is playing the sensible big sister role over at Victoria Crater. Well done Opportunity! You’ve got a paper in Science!

The findings are the result of a daring move by the rover’s handlers on Earth back in September 2007 when they drove Opportunity into Victoria crater, which the rover had been nosing around the rim of for over a year.

And the news from Victoria? Well, the crater’s walls were shaped by water in a way very similar to other craters a few miles away. The implication is that the entire region was shaped by water, long ago, rather than just isolated pockets of water acting locally.

“Given that we’ve seen the same stuff at places that are miles apart, it is a reasonable conjecture that those processes operated over most of this region," Steve Squyres, rover PI told National Geographic.

The Voice of America goes with a slightly familiar-sounding headline. “NASA scientists find more evidence of water on Mars,” which I’m not convinced is the real story here, although is factual for sure. Squyres pops up again in that story, explaining that water and life don’t necessarily mean a nice place for a day trip with the kids: "I want to stress though that it was a nasty place. You know, we say water but this stuff was more like sulfuric acid. It was very, very salty; it was kind of a more like brine,” he says.

Online NewsHour reminds us just how long the rovers have been up there, five years.

Alongside the discovery that a large region was shaped by water, Opportunity’s travels also revealed that the crater is made from sulphate-rich sedimentary rock, and that on the crater floor are dunes. The evidence for these dunes is “gorgeous, striking” Squyres says.

Perhaps Spirit, who is “Stuck in “insidious invisible rover trap’ on Mars” will welcome a few days out of the limelight to concentrate on the task in hand – becoming unstuck.

Image: False color image of Cape St. Vincent at Victoria Crater, Mars, courtesy of Steven Squyres