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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Director Updates _ 2004 03 04

Posted by: OWW Sep 29 2004, 10:14 PM

Hello, welcome to the Mars Exploration Rover mission support area. I am George Chen. I am the flight director for MER-A, Spirit.
This is sol 60, the sixtieth day on the surface of Mars. Yesterday was sol 59 and we began the day by drilling a hole on the rock known as Humphrey which is in the image behind me here.
We drilled for four hours using the Rock Abrasion Tool, the tool we affectionately call the RAT. Afterwards we put the Mossbauer spectrometer, the APXS spectrometer and began some PanCam imaging of the rock.
This morning we plan to finish up the APXS measurements and then use our Microscopic Imager to take a very close look at the hole. After that we are going to back up the rover .85 meters, 85 centimeters, and take additional PanCams of the RAT-hole and MiniTESes of the RAT-hole.

On MER-B, sol 39 for Opportunity, they did some coordinated measurements with the Mars Express orbiter from the European Space Agency. Afterwards they did some very complicated imaging with their Microscopic Imager to build up a 3D image of a rock known as Last Chance. This rock is very interesting because there is some evidence of crossbedding which is a phenomenon that could be indicative of liquid water on the surface of that rock.
So we have a very exciting day for both vehicles on the surface of Mars today. Thank you.

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