2004 03 12, March 12th, 2004 Options

[OWW]

Good afternoon, I’m Joel Krajewski, Flight Director for Spirit. Today is the 12th of March 2004.

It is sol 68 on Spirit and recall that our goal here is we are at the ridge of Bonneville crater and the goal over today and tomorrow is to do a survey, a high resolution survey, of the inside of the crater to decide what me might want to explore further.
Yesterday we drove 14 meters, a little further into the crater edge, to get a better view of what’s right below us. And we also took an image of behind us of the parachute and backshell, two pieces of equipement that we used to fly in with and that picture is over my shoulder to my right, your left.
Today, we’re gonna take high resolution PanCam images of the whole crater in order to get very specific understanding of what’s in there and that will drive our plan for tomorrow to decide what we want to do.

On Opportunity it is sol 47. The goal is to do more IDD science on the blueberries, the little Marsberries, the spherules, that we found in this crater. We have placed the IDD in a little different place within an area called ‘Berry Bowl’. Placed it in a particularly high concentration of these little spherical objects. And we started a 15 hour Mossbauer integration, long integration. A part of the bowl has a particularly high concentration of those berries. So that integration is going on right now and in the middle of the night tonight we will turn on the instrument arm, turn and change it to a different tool, the APXS spectrometer, and start an integration using that science instrument.

The spacecraft is healthy and so we are ready to go.