I suppose they're talking about the thing to the left that looks like a railroad tie?

"Looks like" <> "is."

The photo's address has an embedded date of 2005/05/24, so this is in the neighborhood of Endurance Crater. Notice that the rover drove right over the "tie!" Looks like NASA did nothing to suppress this image, but the caption makes no mention of the "tie." It's hardly been leaked.

If there is an online archive of all rover images (and I suspect there is, I'm just too lazy to search for it), it would be interesting to see if there are other images of the same thing. The rover site has a couple of 3D anaglyphs of the panorama.

I'm more curious about the bright spot closer to the horizon. It's not an imaging artifact; it's on both the left- and right-eye images.

Fred

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