2004 03 24, March 24th, 2004 Options

[OWW]

Hello, and welcome to the rover update for Wednesday March 24th, my name is Jessica Collisson and I am the Flight Director for Opportunity today.

Today is sol 59 for Opportunity and now that we have driven back to the bright material around the crater, today we are set up to use our Instrument Deploment Device and take some Microscopic Images of two different patches of soil within the workvolume of the Instrument Deployment Device. After we take those images we’re going to put the Mossbauer instrument down and run this instrument overnight and remember this is the instrument that looks at the iron content. Another interesting thing that Opportunity is gonna be doing is taking some images using the Panoramic Cameras and the Navigation Cameras to evaluate this rock called ‘Big Bounce’ and it looks like we possibly could have bounced near it or on top of it by the depressions that we see in the area near that target so it’s definitely a target of interest in the upcoming sols and we’re starting to plan our strategy of driving over to that target.

Spirit is healthy and just completed some RAT-brushing activities on the large rock ‘Mazatzal’ which has parked itself in front of . There’ll be a couple of days spent here doing the different activities on this rock. Tomorrow they’re gonna continue with using the instruments and in particular the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer and getting ready to RAT in a couple of sols here too.

So, very exciting information that we’re getting from these rovers and stay tuned.