You can see an airbag print from the landing craft bouncing on the crater edge.  Now look at the edge more clearly- why does it appear to be raised from the ground?

   Yet the airbag print seems to counter that thought.  It appears continuous.  It is almost as if the crater has a "lining" under it, and the sand surrounding it is level at some points and lower at others.  Perhaps the bag impact filled the gap at that point.

   One final question- why is the edge of this "lining" outlined so precisely in lighter material at a uniform distance?  Perhaps there was a large algal mat that filled this crater and then fossilized.  A closer look shows that the inside of the "bowl" has a layer of rock and litter on it that is at a precise distance from the lip.

   Click the image for a larger view.

   Note: this is my first shot at assembling the full color images from the raw filtered data.  Any oddness in the color is my own fault, but it appears to be pretty close to the actual thing.

  One thing I am sure of- that is the proper color of sky for Mars.  Looking at the raw image data makes it abundantly clear that Mars will usually have a blue sky, not that pink or red they often show in the news pictures.

   I used the 483 nm as blue, 535 nm as green, and 602 nm as red for this image.  I am still not as skilled as Keith Laney at making these color composites, but even this poor image can show the effects of water.

   I am also very curious about that odd shaped depression with the circular feature on that rock.

   This is the truest color rendering I could assemble with the frequencies that JPL picked to transmit back.  The whiter dust is from the grinding operation performed by the RAT.  The wet area extends from below the rock to well onto the shelf at its top edge.

   I was told by two scientists (whom I will not name) that "this and the apparent riverbeds are really the result of the action of some chemical solvent that could act like water but is not water."

   I have really looked at this with a critical eye, and the CRC handbook and the Merck index do not turn up any conceivable chemical compound that might be a liquid that evaporates at Martian surface conditions and also is abundant enough to create erosion and weathering.

   I prefer Occam's razor here- the simplest explanation is that there is water, not some strange chemical.

   This is pretty clear and strong evidence that Mars indeed has liquid water on its surface.  It is there now and it shows itself very clearly.  Now, any bets on whether there are still living Martian organisms?

   Click here for a stereo anaglyph of this.

   Water appears to well up from below the rock, but with either enough force or volume to reach onto the rock itself.  A sharp eye will notice some small green edges on the rock.  It may well be some sort of algae, but it also could be an artifact from the images being taken at different times- the lighting would change and introduce false color halos at some points.

   However, the same rock after a couple of days of moisture and now the dust from the RAT has either blown away or cannot be seen by this combination of filters.

   Also, note that the whole rock seems to be a startling shade of green.  It is a nice slate gray in the previous image, and the lighting conditions seem much darker- maybe it is early morning or late evening now.

   In any case, the filters might be the cause, the lighting might be it, or the rock might just have turned green in a matter of 49 hours.  Algae?

   Keep in mind that on Mars, the sunlight is only about 43% as intense, but that also means that the UV is 43% as intense as it normally would be.

   The JPL logo on this shot is clearly well-lit.  The white purity is excellent and the red purity is as well.  This indicates that the colors overall should be trustworthy.  So I am puzzled by the sudden change in rock and soil color.  It would be very informative to have these shots in 483 nm and 602 nm.  I can see that even the "blueberries" are ruddy red.  Personally, I would have demanded reference color dots on every visible part of the spacecraft so we could clear this sort of question up immediately.  They weigh nothing!

   A rock will not simply cave in and vanish, leaving a hollow outline behind.  This is the result of some unusual process.

   I have circled this and the next image shows a close-up of the area.  Also take note of the strange "runoff" areas that look very much like a wash area in a desert.

   Water did this- you can see how it flowed downhill and left the blueberries exposed behind it.

   Yes, blueberries- and this is Spirit and not Opportunity.

   See how it houses some rock structure that has lots of rounded thing that look sort of like barnacles?

   Literally everything inside the hollow has a hole in it.  This is quite unusual for rocks.

   Still, it is unmistakable that this is some sort of rock outline that is surrounding a lot of little rocks with holes in them.  They appear to be about the same size and you don't see any of them outside of the outline.

   Was this some sort of colony similar to a stromatolite?  Click this link to get the larger view.

   In the larger view you can see many thousands of spherules that are identical to the ones found by Opportunity.  This area was loaded with cystoids and sea urchins.

   The first image is at the far left of the frame, just visible in its entirety.  It appears to be a loop of root or branch that emerges from the ground and then enters it again.

   Endurance crater shows many such anomalies, making it an excellent place for Opportunity to study.

   The original NASA image is here.

   The stereo view does not really resolve whether this is a rock with a lit portion sticking up, or whether it is a loop of material sticking out of the ground.

   The original NASA image is here.