2004 03 17, March 17th, 2004 Options

[OWW]

Good afternoon, I’m Joel Krajewski, Flight Director for MER-A Spirit. This is the 17th of March 2004.

It’s sol 73 on Spirit. You may recall today, our major general goal is to study a dust drift that we have found on the edge of Bonneville crater. Yesterday we drove up to the dustdrift and took our front wheel and made a trench. Did a little turn, got the front wheel in front of us, dragged it backwards, turned again to … this trench we are looking for, in order to dig down into the dirt and see what is underneath the upper crust. Nice dark stuff.
So today we are going to send up commands to stretch out the instrument arm and take Microscopic Imager images and also do some APXS and Mossbauer integrations on it to find out more about the dust in this drift. And that’ll be today’s plan for Spirit.

For Opportunity it is sol 52 and Opportunity is also exploring the southern part of Opportuny crater. In particular, here we’re also going for soil targets. So yesterday we drove up to our first soil target, or rather two sols ago we did. Yesterday we stretched out the intstrument arm and took some sample of that target and then back down the crater about three meters, a little bit more, a little further to the east, and drove back up the crater rim to get a second target, soil target, and in particular this is a soil target that has a little bit of light and a little bit of dark soil next to eachother so we’re gonna study both of those. And that was today’s activities on Opportunity.

So, those are the updates for today, we’ll see you again tomorrow for further updates on the Mars Exploration Rovers.