Mars Rover Spirit, a rover no more.

This week on Planetary Radio. Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final

frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Mars Exploration Rover Project

Manager John Callis returns to tell us about the permanent home spirit has found

on Mars, along with the challenges and opportunities facing the little X

rover, and speaking of opportunity, Emily will tell us how we know the small crater Spirit

sister is approaching is far younger than any examined before.

Bill Nye and Bruce Betts, too, in a jam-packed episode.

Emily, we're just a couple of minutes away from talking to John Callis, the project manager for the rovers,

and one of the things people are going to hear him mention is this little crater, cute Crater that Opportunity is approaching. In fact in your

January 29 blog entry you show that opportunity is just about on top of it. Yeah, it's quite a cute little crater and it's very, very blocky.

Clearly it's a very fresh crater.

It happened not very long ago.

And as a matter of fact, in a JPL update, they said it was about a thousand years old and that made several people

wonder how do we know that it's a thousand years old after all we weren't there when it happened.

I didn't know the answer to that so I sent an email off to a couple of the geologists on the rover mission

and Matt Gollumbek answered my question.

And he said that's actually work that I did.

It goes back to trying to figure out

when the dunes at Maridi last moved.

And they counted craters all over those dunes in images from the high-rise and CTX cameras

...