2004 03 26, March 26th, 2004 Options

[OWW]

Hello, it’s Friday March 26th and this is the update for the Mars Exploration Rovers today. My name is Chris Lewicki and I’m the Flight Director for Opportunity.

Spirit just completed its sol 81. Operations at a rock called ‘Mazatzal’. Yesterday they RAT-ted this rock about four millimeters, trying to go for four millimeters deep, but didn’t quite achieve that and we’ll need to re-RAT it in the future, so we end up with a little bit of a halfround shape as you can see in the picture to my right.
Today’s activities are gonna include a Microscopic Imager mosaic of the ‘New York’ area on ‘Mazatzal’ and we expect to spend a few more days at this rock to study it and it’s a little bit unusual from all the other rocks in the area.

Opportunity is in the middle of its sol 61 today. We woke up this morning at ‘Bright Spot’ and we’ll be driving about 27 meters today to an area called ‘Dark Spot’, very creative name today for our locations. Along our 27 meter drive we’ll be conducting an experiment in a technique called visual odometry and that’s where the rover uses pictures of the area around to determine how far it’s moved. And this will help us when we start doing our really long drives on both Spirit and Opportunity, so that the rover will have a better idea of where it’s moved to.

And that’s what’s happenning on Mars today.