2004 04 02, April 2nd, 2004 Options

[OWW]

Hello, it’s Friday April 2nd and this is the Flight Director update for the Mars Exploration Rovers. My name is Chris Lewicki and I’m the Flight Director for Opportunity today.

Spirit is on sol 88 and finishing up its day. Today they mostly drove and did some middrive remote sensing. They were able to achieve 38 meters of driving today, which was good. Total odometry on the mission now is up to 568 meters which is just short of our goal of reaching 600 meters for the whole mission.
Tomorrow they’re planning for over two hours of additional driving hoping to get almost 60 meters under the belt.

At Opportunity it is sol 68 and we are at ‘Bounce’ rock still examining it in detail as it’s one of the few rocks around. This morning we’re going to do a microscopic image of a target called ‘Glanz2’ and it’s a soil target and then we’ll back the rover out about 85 centimeters so that the instruments on the PanCam mast can get a good look at the post-RAT-ted ‘Bounce’ rock. What we’ll do then is a few coordinated observations with the Mini-TES instrument with the Mars Global Surveyor which also has a similar instrument, so we’ll be able to take observations of the atmosphere from orbit now and from the ground up looking at the same column of air, so that’s a good coordinated experiment. After that we’ll drive back forward to ‘Bounce’ rock with a slightly different approach trajectory so we can get a little bit more on the right side of ‘Bounce’ rock.
In the next few days we’re looking at doing a little bit more IDD activity at ‘Bounce’ rock and then starting our long drive towards ‘Anatolia’.

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