2004 06 16, June 16th, 2004 Options

[OWW]

Hello, welcome to the Flight Director report for June 16th 2004. I’m George Chen, Flight Director of MER-A Spirit.

Today is the evening of sol 161 on MER-A Spirit and we’ve finished recovering from our IDD arm sequencing problem that we had yesterday. There was a minor sequencing problem that prevented the arm from moving and also accidently left on some heaters and the Alpha Proton X-ray Spectrometer instrument. So we had to ask our fellow Mars travellers, the Odyssey spacecraft, to send a command to the rover for us. And they were able to successfully turn off those instruments for us and save us a lot of power. So this is an example of good cooperation between the different missions at Mars at this time. We also were able to retract the MI, Microscopic Imager, instrument and we also took some pictures of some rocks in front of us and you can see that in an image behind me right now and we’re waiting for the scientists to explain some of the interesting rock morphology that we’re seeing here. And then after that we turned the rover a few degrees so that we can have better accessability in some of the rocks in front of Spirit at this time.

On the other side of the planet, MER-B Opportunity is still exploring Endurance crater. So, they are currently finishing up a Mossbauer integration of a Rock Abrasion Tool hole that was dug a few sols ago. And then it will take some Mini-TES observations of the terrain deeper into the crater and then afterwards drive forward about 70 centimeters so that we can put two rocks into the reachability space of the arm.

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