I neglected to mention one important development from yesterday. On landing night, after I had finished freaking out about our successful safe landing, I noticed that fellow ChemCam post-doc Nina Lanza was wearing a very special ChemCam shirt with this on the front:

CHEMREX (Image Credit: Mouser Williams)

As a big fan of lasers and dinosaurs (my favorite toys as a kid were DinoRiders), I had to ask about it. Apparently Nina had made an offhand comment about how the only way to make ChemCam more awesome would be if it were on a dinosaur. Or something like that. In any case, ten minutes later her husband had whipped up this amazing image of ChemRex. The only logical next step was to put it on a t-shirt.

Yesterday, once I had been released from my PUL role and Nina was getting ready to head back to Los Alamos until next week, we decided that ChemRex really needed to be shared more prominently with the rest of the team. So we printed ChemRex out and pasted him just outside the ChemCam operations room:

ChemRex takes his place on the wall between the ChemCam and REMS rooms, just to the west of the Pyrenees.

If you are wondering what all those other pictures pasted to the wall are, well, they are the Pyrenees. We are neighbors with the REMS team, who are mostly from Spain. Since our team is half French, the logical separation between France and Spain is the Pyrenees, To spice things up, some photos representing New Mexico have also been added. As you can tell, this Mars exploration stuff is Serious Business.