The biggest dust storms don't usually begin until one or two months after perihelion, ... This one coming so early in the season makes me think Mars is heading for a spell of big dust storms.

The climate models predict that as the orbit of Mars evolves, the tilt of its spin axis changes.

We call them the mother lode of hematite.

It's getting to be a fairly old spacecraft and it's been having a number of issues; none of them are considered life-threatening.

It will be wild and crazy.

Maybe we can't afford not to have redundancy.

For us, it's a big deal. We just doubled our probability of succeeding.

Instead of all our eggs and 10 years of work in one basket, we have a second vehicle and a much higher chance of success.