2004 03 30, March 30th, 2004 Options

[OWW]

Hello, it’s Tuesday March 30th and this is the Flight Director update for the Mars Exploration Rovers. It’s sol 85 on Spirit and sol 65 on Opportunity.

Today at Bonneville crater Spirit is continuing its examination of ‘Mazatzal’ rock. It’s re-RAT-ting of the ‘Brooklyn’ area is complete and they’re taking a thorough look at those RAT-holes. Included in that is Microscopic Imaging of the ‘Brooklyn’ RAT-hole in pseudo color which we flip a dustcap back and forth and compute a crude color representation of the material we’re looking at. We’re also taking a 3D image of the Microscopic Imager of a target on ‘Mazatzal’ called ‘Hawaii’, rounding out some more of the states. Also included in the activities were a superresolution image of the backshell on the other side of Bonneville crater and this will probably be our last image in the direction of Bonneville. And also an attempt to take some dustdevil images if we can find them. And for the evening Spirit has its Mossbauer instrument at ‘Brooklyn’ and we’ll be integrating that overnight before doing a few RAT-brushes tomorrow and driving off.

On the other side of Mars, on Opportunity, it’s sol 65. It’s currently about 9:44 in the morning and we’re getting ready to do our morning uplink. Today we are at ‘Bounce’ rock and we are recovered from our activities yesterday where we were examining a problem with one of the onboard memory sections. We solved that problem today and are moving forward. So we’ll be taking an indepth examination of ‘Bounce’ rock with the Microscopic Imager at four different targets and also integrating the Mossbauer and APXS instruments on that target overnight.
Opportunity will also be taking some superresolution images. But Opportunity will be looking at its backshell. And tomorrow we’ll be looking forward to either RAT-ting on ‘Bounce’ rock or starting our trek towards ‘Endurance’ crater.

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