Hello, this is the Flight Director update for Friday February 27th. My name is Jessica Collisson and today I am the flight director for the Opportunity rover.
Pretty soon the rover will be waking up and getting ready to receive the commandload for the morning. After that commandload is received, it will do some engineering activities for health assessment and cleanup activities and then we’ll take a nap for about an hour in preparation for the big RAT-ting activities that we are going to do today. So we are going to conserve some power in the morning, so that we can run the Rock Abrasion Tool on our target Guadalupe, which is right in front of us, for about 2 hours and 45 minutes. Before we place the Rock Abrasion Tool on the target we will take some micro-images of the area. And then after the Rock Abrasion Tool has completed, we will place the Mossbauer instrument down and we will let the Mossbauer instrument run overnight and collect data on that new target.
So exciting day, this is the second RAT activity that the Opportunity rover will be doing and so it should be good information for the team to assess.
Spirit today completed an approach to its target called Humphrey. This is about a half a meter sized rock in front of it. And the overnight team is currently planning some brushing of the rock. Using the Rock Abrasion Tool we can both brush the surface of a target and grind the surface of a target. So they are going to be using the brush to be able to use more instrument on a larger area and to assess the properties of that rock.
So stay tuned and we’ll pick up with the update on Monday.
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