It does seem like there was a lot of dust kicking around. Was there anything said yet about if that was more or less dust than they expected? Maybe they don't even know how much dust is on the rover yet?
they seemed to be expecting dust on the hazcams, which i think i remember them saying (it was very early..) still had covers on them for the first shots.
Clear covers though, in case they didn't pop off as expected. Clever!
Somewhat related, and perhaps my favorite facepalm moment in space probe history: "...the titanium lens cap on Venera 14 landed precisely on the area which was targeted by the soil compression probe." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera#Venera_camera_failures_a...)
