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Posted by: OWW Sep 30 2004, 07:39 PM

Hello, welcome to the Mars Exploration Rover Mission Support area. I’m George Chen, Flight Director of MER-A Spirit.

Today we have a very exciting day. Finally we get to drive up to the rim of Bonneville crater and finally be able to peer into the crater and see what’s at the bottom. We’ve been driving hard for the last several sols and finally we can come up to the rim of the crater and be able to actually look inside.
Yesterday we drove we drove for approximately 30 meters and obtained this image behind me where you can see both the near and far rims of the crater and at the same time you can also see an object in the upperright corner which we believe is the heatshield that we jettisoned just before landing. So, we’re all waiting very anxiously to see what’s inside this crater.

On the other side of the planet, MER-B Opportunity is being a field geologist again. We did some RAT-ting of a rock target known as ‘Mojo 2’. And then we used the Microscopic Imager to take some close-ups of ‘Mojo 2’. Then we backed off and took some Mini-TES images of the local area including ‘Mojo 2’ and then we used the PanCam to take a picture of the RAT-magnets as well as the nearby surrounds as well, including also a picture of ‘Mojo 2’.

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