Todd Bishop, at the Seattle PI, attended the RSA Conference.  He reports his “quote of the week” from Steven Squyres, scientific principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover Project, explaining how the team figured out how to get the Opportunity Rover unstuck.

"[We] spent two and a half weeks rehearsing, trying to find the optimal technique for extracting a robot from a sand dune on another planet. And there are a lot of things you can do. You can drive the wheels at different velocities, you can steer the wheels, you can rock the vehicle back and forward. After two and a half weeks we found the optimal technique. Turns out that the optimal technique is to put it in reverse and gun it."

Hey, you’re all gamers…  Would it take you two and a half weeks to figure that one out?  Maybe when the rover’s done sampling data, they’ll allow gamers to take a turn at the controls over Xbox Live…