There were jokes about the (very rare, of course) moments when Cornell's central administration is a lot like, well, a Martian dust storm. And there was commiserating about the aches and pains that come with age -- for humans and Mars rovers alike.

But if it was news that Cornell President David Skorton sat in on a routine planning teleconference for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission in the Space Sciences building June 23, it was perhaps for the singular fact that it happened on day 1,570 of the rover Opportunity's planned 90-day excursion.

Had Opportunity and its twin Spirit stuck to the letter of their mission objectives, in fact, they would have been mere red planet relics long before Skorton became Cornell's 12th president in 2006 -- not to mention before he and principal investigator Steve Squyres, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Astronomy, coordinated their frenetic schedules for their first in-person meeting.

As it happens, though, both rovers are still healthy (albeit with said aches and pains), and the plans for Opportunity's coming week centered around photography.

Having positioned the rover carefully near the bottom of Victoria Crater, Squyres and MER team members at Cornell and the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena spent much of the telecon discussing the details of what Squyres called "a Pancam panorama for the ages." It was a meticulous photo shoot of the layered rock that comprises the crater's 6-meter-high Cape Verde promontory using the rover's panoramic camera, or Pancam.

In a chat with Skorton after the telecon, Squyres detailed a few of the mission's highlights -- including the serendipitous 2007 discovery of amorphous silica in the soil around the Gusev Crater feature known as Home Plate.

The finding, published last month in the journal Science, is a key indicator that the site was once home to some combination of volcanic activity and flowing water. But the mineral would likely have gone undiscovered, Squyres said, had it not been unearthed by the rover's stuck-and-dragging right front wheel.

"The wheel digs this wonderful hundreds-of-meters-long trench through the Martian soil, and every once in a while something wonderful will pop up in that trench," Squyres said. "It's one of the most significant discoveries of the Spirit mission ... and we wouldn't have found it if it hadn't been for that dead wheel."

Skorton also admired the two earlier Pancam images of the Martian landscape on the wall outside Squyres' office. "This is so beautiful," he said. "Wonderful."