Printable Version of Topic

Click here to view this topic in its original format

Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Director Updates _ 2004 03 02

Posted by: OWW Sep 29 2004, 10:11 PM

Good morning, my name is Leo Bister, I am the Opportunity flight director today. I will tell you a little bit about Opportunity. Yesterday, we did some driving. We had been at a place where we drilled two RAT-holes. We finished at that site, backed up, and did some driving around our outcrop, which is in the crater where we are currently located in the plains of Meridiani.
The drive yesterday consisted of four segments, ith some imaging done at various locations along the way. We got to within 30 centimers of our intended science target which was a very good day of driving, because we do slip around a bit as we drive on the rocks and so, getting that close to where we intended to be was very good.
So we are at a spot near Big Bend which is our intended science target. What we plan to do today is to use the intrument arm, we are going to put that down on the rock, do some science using our Mossbauer instrument and then we will stow the arm again and drive to the location we intended to go to yesterday. And then tomorrow we will again use the instrument arm to do more science at the Big Bend location. We will be using the Microscopic Imager camera at that location. So that is the plan for Opportunity.

Spirit today is at a place called Middle Ground which is about halfway along its route to the crater Bonneville. And at Middle Ground they found a rock called Humphrey which is very interesting. And the plan today was to do about four hours of RAT-ting, that is drilling a hole in the rock. We got about 20 minutes of RAT-ting done. And we need to determine exactly why the RAT operation stopped. But our plan is to go ahead and do some Mossbauer science and APX science in the hole that we were able to drill, overnight tonight.
Tomorrow the plan is to change some settings of the RAT tool and to try again to get the full four hour RAT-ting operation complete there. We also plan to take a full panorama of that location where we currently are. Following that, in about a day and a half, we will again begin our drive towards Bonneville crater.
Both rovers remain in excellent health and that’s it for now. Have a great day.

Powered by Invision Power Board (http://www.invisionboard.com)
© Invision Power Services (http://www.invisionpower.com)