2004 03 31, March 31st, 2004 Options

[OWW]

Good morning, it’s Wednesday March 31st, my name is Chris Lewicki and I’m the Flight Director for Opportunity today. It’s finishing up sol 86 on Gusev crater with Spirit and Opportunity is starting sol 66.

Today, Spirit is backing off from ‘Mazatzal’ and getting ready to drive away. They just finished a six position RAT-brush mosaic on ‘Mazatzal’ rock and the pictures from this are quite interesting. It made a nice flower pattern on the rock and at the moment they’re backed off taking Mini-TES observations of this area in preparations for a driving towards ‘Columbia’ hills.
Tomorrow morning they‘ll be doing a PanCam observation of clouds before starting their drive.

On Opportunity today we are at ‘Bounce’ rock preparing to RAT a location called ‘Case’. And we plan to RAT for about two hours today. We expect to get about five millimeters or so into the rock. After we’re done with that RAT activity we will take some microscopic images and place the Mossbauer on the hole for integration overnight and tomorrow we’ll kind of do the same thing that Spirit did today, back up from the rock, take some observations of it, and get ready to drive.

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