2004 04 27, April 27th, 2004 Options

[OWW]

Hello, it’s April 27th and this is the update for the Mars Exploration Rovers. My name is Chris Lewicki.

It’s sol 92 at Meridiani and Opportunity has finished a medium length drive towards our goal of Endurance crater. We did about 40 meters today, leaving only about a 100 meters left till we are at the rim of Endurance crater. Probably takes a couple more days to get there as we need some light days to regain back on some power on Opportunity.

On the other side of the planet, at Spirit, we are planning for sol 113 and today will be a trenching day. We’re going to take some measurements before we start the trench with the Mossbauer and the Microscopic Imager. Then we’re gonna back up a little bit and perform a trenching operation and tomorrow we’ll spend time with the Instrument Deployment Device down in the trench taking some measurements.

We’re also starting on both spacecraft now to use elevated capability with the relay orbiters. We’re gonna be starting transmitting at 256 kilobits/sec. Our first pass on Spirit just finished and it worked quite well and we’re looking forward to contintued use of that on both Spirit and Opportunity. We’re also shifting towards more use of Odyssey and less use of the Mars Global Surveyor when we’re using our relays. So our data situations are continuing to improve as we get into the extended mission.

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