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The Mars rover Opportunity is working to free itself from a patch of loose soil it got stuck in on Monday. But rover scientists are hopeful it will escape relatively easily, since it got out of a similar predicament last year simply by spinning its wheels backwards. The rover was attempting to drive along a trough between the crests of ripples in the Martian soil when it got stuck. But it is not mired as deeply as it was in April 2005, when it was trapped for about five weeks on a 30-centimetre-high ripple of soil, nicknamed "Purgatory Dune".

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The thruster residue that might be on the Kromka plate is toxic. The residue can cause damage to the eyes, so spacewalking astronauts were supposed to put a plate from the experiment in a bag that snaps tightly shut like a clamshell. But the crew could not find that bag when they were collecting together their spacewalking gear on the station. So they may use another bag, close it with bungee cords and then put it inside several other bags.

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Space shuttle Discovery's external fuel tank appears to be safe to fly the next mission on 1 July, according to shuttle managers and engineers who completed a two-day review on Wednesday. NASA still expects some of the orange foam insulation to come off the external fuel tank during launch, but nothing as big as that shed during the last two shuttle flights.