2004 05 03, May 3rd, 2004 Options

[OWW]

Hello, it’s Monday May 3rd and this is the update for the Mars Exploration Rovers. My name is Chris Lewicki and I’m working on Spirit today.

It’s sol 118 going into sol 119 at Gusev crater and Spirit had a busy weekend. We’re next to Lahontan crater right now and we’ve done a recordsetting 92.4 meter drive on Spirit over the weekend. That’s not the Mars Exploration Rover record, Opportunity still has that at 140 meters. But it’s the best we’ve done on Spirit so far. That brings the total odometry on Spirit to 1535 meters, so are odometers are rolling over and over. Today is going to be some more driving past Lahontan crater. We’re hoping for a total of about 30 meters of driving today.
Over the weekend we finished up our activities at the trench and we’re continuing our trek towards the Columbia hills.

On the other side of the planet, at Meridiani, Opportunity is on sol 98 and we are AT Endurance crater, since Friday. Our total odometry right now is about 985 meters and we’ve been spending the last few days and we’ll also spend today, surveying Endurance crater in all the wavelenghts that we can. We’re taking a really detailed look and we are stunned by what we’re seeing. It’s quite a spectacular view.
The next few days on Opportunity will be surveying the crater and then driving around the crater to survey it at two additional locations. And while we’re looking at this data we’ll determine if it’s going to be safe enough to drive down into the crater and get a closer look at what we see.

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