2004 03 25, March 25th, 2004 Options

[OWW]

Hello, it’s Thursday March 25th and this is the update for the Mars Exploration Rovers. My name is Chris Lewicki and I am the Flight Director for Opportunity.

Spirit just finished its sol 80 and they’ve been at a rock called ‘Mazatzal’ and they’re doing a number of activities over a number of days in preparation of RAT-ting objects at this rock tomorrow. Today is composed primarily of the long instrument integrations with the Alpha Proton X-ray Spectrometer and the Mossbauer spectrometer at these sites so that we know them in detail, when we grind away a little bit at the rock surface.
They’ve named a lot of these targets after states in the nation. Today we’re taking a microscopic image of ‘Texas’, a Mossbauer of ‘Long Island’ although not a state, enough people live there, and APXS of ‘Texas’ and are also taking Mini-TES and PanCam images of Bonneville crater which we’re starting to get away from now.

For Opportunity we are in the middle of our day right now on sol 60 and today is comprised primarily of looking at an object called ‘Bright Spot’. We’re also, while we are doing that, taking what is called the Lion King panorama, which from our vantage point now outside of the crater which you can see on the left, we’re kind of getting a look at the lay of the land all around us. This will be a very high resolution panorama to look forward to.
Tomorrow we look forward to driving to a rock called ‘Bounce Rock’ or there’s another object that we might drive down called ‘Windstreak’ and find out more about them.

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