This triumphant panorama is the culmination of Spirit's arduous ascension of Husband Hill, in the Columbia Hills, named for the space shuttle and her last crew. The rover took the frames that went into this image in August 2005. It shows the view down into the Inner Basin and Home Plate, where she would spend the rest of her mission. Courtesy of strong gusts of wind at the hill's peak that swept the rover's deck clean, Spirit looks shiny and new.
Opportunity finally arrived at Victoria Crater in late September 2006, pulling up to one of the scallops in the rim, which the team christened Duck Bay. For the next nine months, the rover explored a good part of Victoria’s rim. Then in June 2007, she returned to Duck Bay where the team planned for the rover to drive into the crater.
Over at Gusev, Spirit had hiked down from Husband Hill’s second summit heading for Home Plate, a circular plateau, about 90 meters in diameter that was too intriguing not to check out. However, near the bottom of the hill, in December 2005, the robot came across a strange looking outcrop. The team members commanded her to stop and use all her instruments to examine this outcrop soon named Comanche.
Mars Science Team member Richard Morris, senior planetary scientist and manager of the Spectroscopy and Magnetics Laboratory at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC), knew from his first look at Spirit’s Comanche data from the iron-detecting Mössbauer spectrometer that something was different. It would take Morris and others on the MER Science Team years to find it, but the rover had sent home data rich with undeniable evidence of past water.
By February 2006 Spirit was exploring Home Plate and spent several months checking it out before heading for McCool Hill, named for Columbia’s pilot Willie McCool. The team planned for Spirit to survive the mission’s second winter on that hill, just as she had on Husband Hill. But that was not to be.
The steering actuator for Spirit’s right front wheel broke. No longer able to climb hills and with winter coming on, time was running out. In late May 2006, the mission managers decided to reverse the rover’s course. The robot turned around and drove, valiantly it seemed, backwards, dragging her lame wheel, descending several meters from her climb toward a north-facing slope on McCool Hill to seek haven on a slope in Low Ridge. She managed to settle in just in time for the mission’s second Martian winter.
Months later, Spirit emerged from the mission’s second Martian winter and roved back to Home Plate. "We decided to go back to Home Plate, once the Martian winter ended, because it is one of the most interesting places that we've found on Gusev Crater," Squyres said then. It was a good call. Spirit was about to hit a home run for planetary science there.
