Printable Version of Topic

Click here to view this topic in its original format

Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Director Updates _ 2004 03 08

Posted by: OWW Sep 30 2004, 07:10 PM

Good afternoon, my name is Joel Krajewski, I am the Flight Director for Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, particular.

Now, today is the 8th of March 2004. Today on Spirit it is sol 64. Our general goal for this week is to drive to the crater rim. Yesterday on sol 63 we got our longest drive so far, 35 meters. That left us around 80 meters away from the crater rim. Today, we are gonna try to make it a little further yet, another 25 to 30 meters today. This morning we sent up the commands to achieve that and in about an hour we are gonna get the downlink to find out how we did. All systems on Spirit are healthy and so we are good to drive.

On Opportunity it is the end of sol 43. The general goal, the three sols on opportunity, is to grind a rock known as ‘Flatrock’.
Yesterday, on sol 42, we attempted to do the grind with the Rock Abrasion Tool on ‘Flatrock’. Yet the hole that was created was a little shallower than we expected, only a couple of millimeters. And so today, we did some diagnostic tests on the RAT, on the grinder, to determine whether there was any problem with the instrument. All the tests looked good and so we concluded that we could try again in the same hole in the same rock with using a higher voltage this time in order to get a little more muscle behind the RAT as it does its grind.
The other thing we did today while we were doing the diagnostic tests on the RAT, is we did take some spectrometry measurements with the Mossbauer and some images of the Microscopic Imager on the shallow hole we created yesterday.
All systems are healthy also on Opportunity so we expect to be able to complete our grind tomorrow.

So that’s the update for today. We’ll see you tomorrow for a further update on our progress on the Mars Exploration Rovers.

Powered by Invision Power Board (http://www.invisionboard.com)
© Invision Power Services (http://www.invisionpower.com)