SPACE.com -- Rocky Mountain High: Spirit Rover Surveys its Surroundings

"NASA's Mars rover Spirit is experiencing the robotic high life--literally--now that it has reached to top of Husband Hill after a slow, year-long climb.

Perched some 270 feet--about the height of the Statue of Liberty--above the plains of its Gusev Crater landing site, Spirit has returned images of stunning new vistas that include a potential winter refuge as the Martian seasons progress, mission scientists said Thursday during a press conference at NASA's Washington, D.C. headquarters.



"That's no Mt. Everest, but it's a heck of a climb for our little rover," Steve Squyres, principal investigator of the rover's science mission at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, told reporters. "When we first touched down at Gusev Crater on Jan. 4, 2004, the Columbia Hills looked impossibly far away.'"