NASA's Opportunity Mars rover has started scaling the tallest hill it has yet encountered in its nearly 10 years of Red Planet exploration. Opportunity is working its way up "Solander Point," the northern tip of a 130-foot-tall (40 meters) hill on the rim of Mars' Endeavour Crater. The rover is currently studying rocky outcrops that lie between 6.5 feet and 20 feet (2 to 6 m) above the surrounding plains, and it may climb higher in the coming days and weeks, NASA officials said. "This is our first real Martian mountaineering with Opportunity," Opportunity principal investigator Steve Squyres, of Cornell...
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