2005 10 27, October 27th, 2005 Options

[OWW]

Good morning, I’m Byron Jones and this is the Flight Director report for Thursday, October 27th.

On Spirit, today is sol 646 and she is just wrapping up a weeks’ worth of operational demos, where we are sending our commands through a relay using Mars Odyssey orbiter, rather than directly to the rover through an X-band uplink. She’s at the outcrop called Kansas on Husband Hill and has been doing some microscopic imaging and Moessbauer work the last few sols and will do some Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer over the weekend.

On the other side of Mars, it’s sol 625 for Opportunity, and driving is the name of the game. She got about 45 meters in yesterday and has some more driving planned throughout the weekend. The area around Erebus Crater has pretty high dunes and we are having to navigate around them rather than just drive right along the edge of the crater to the outcrop Payson, which is our next goal.

Well that’s it for today, I’m Byron Jones and that’s what’s happening on Mars today.