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Posted by: OWW Sep 30 2004, 07:41 PM

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

Today is sol 67 on MER-A Spirit. We are continuing our drive toward the rim of the crater. Yesterday, sol 66, we drove about 21 out of the 23 meters that we wanted to drive and we went ahead and took a NavCam panorama that you can see in the image to my right here. You can see the bottom of the crater now for the first time.
So today we’re gonna finish that drive. We’re gonna drive an additional 14 meters toward the center of the crater and in fact we’re gonna be about 5 meters into the crater. And that will pretty much put us in a good position to take some very detailed high resolution panoramas using the PanCams and this will help us make decisions on whether or not we want to continue driving into the crater if there’s anything that we want to get up close and take a look at.

On MER-B Opportunity it is sol 46, the 46th day on the surface of Mars. And they are at a point known as ‘Blueberry Bowl’ at this time. They’ve discovered as you probably may have heard these spherule objects, kind of spherical objects of a few millimeters in diameter, pretty much litters the floor of the crater that they’re in right now. So there is a slight depression in the rock that appears to have collected quite a few of these objects that they’ve nicknamed blueberries.
So today, they drove over to the ‘Blueberry Bowl’ and actually placed the Microscopic Imager onto that bowl and were able to obtain the picture on my left of several of these berries. So, using Microscopic Imagers, they took several shots of the ‘Berry Bowl’ and then they placed the Mossbauer spectrometer on the target so that we can get a good composition measurement of what these spherules or blueberries are made out of.

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