Mars Rover

Space.com

The Opportunity rover on Mars reaches Victoria crater on the red planet and sends back intriguing pictures of the layered rocks on the crater walls, along with dunes already known to exist from the bottom. The plan is for the rover to make an extended stay and study the crater's layout, with a slight chance of navigating its way into it.

"This is a geologist's dream come true," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator for NASA's twin rovers Opportunity and Spirit. "Those layers of rock, if we can get to them, will tell us new stories about the environmental conditions long ago. We especially want to learn whether the wet era that we found recorded in the rocks closer to the landing site extended farther back in time. The way to find that out is to go deeper, and Victoria may let us do that."

The further study of the ancient crater should allow us to more closely determine the formative history of Mars and possibly the extend to which water may have flowed on its surface in the past.