PASADENA, California -- NASA's Mars Exploration rover Opportunity is heading back out to the Red Planet's surrounding plains nearly a year after descending into a large Martian crater to examine exposed ancient rock layers.

"We've done everything we entered Victoria Crater to do and more," said Bruce Banerdt, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.  Banerdt is project scientist for Opportunity and its rover twin, Spirit.

Having completed its job in the crater, Opportunity is now preparing to inspect loose cobbles on the plains. Some of these rocks, approximately fist-size and larger, were thrown long distances when objects hitting Mars blasted craters deeper than Victoria into the Red Planet. Opportunity has driven past scores of cobbles but examined only a few.

"Our experience tells us there's lots of diversity among the cobbles," said Scott McLennan of the State University of New York, Stony Brook. McLennan is a long-term planning leader for the rover science team. "We want to get a better characterization of them. A statistical sampling from examining more of them will be important for understanding the geology of the area."

The Winter edition of Sociological Quarterly included some interesting results about church attendance and performance in high school.   In fact, results showed that church attendance has as much influence on a student's GPA (grade point average, a measure of academic performance) as does whether the parents themselves are college graduates.  The study concluded that the reason for the influence of church was as follows:

• They develop friendship with peers who have similar values
• They're more likely to participate in extracurricular activities
• They regularly contact with adults who provide role models
• The students' parents are more likely to be in contact with their friends' parents

Other studies show that church-goers have less stress and tend to live longer.

Jennifer Glanville from the University of Iowa and colleagues form the University of Notre Dame, David Sikkink and Edwin Hernandez, analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a statistically representative sample of students from the seventh to the twelfth grade that started in 1994.