2004 04 06, April 6th, 2004 Options

[OWW]

Hello, this is the Flight Director update for the Mars Exploration Rovers. My name is Chris Lewicki and I’m the Flight Director for Opportunity.

It’s sol 92 heading into sol 93 at Gusev crater. Spirit is parked at Route 66 in preparation for our flight software load. Today we have a number of activities at Route 66 with the Instrument Deployment Device including Microscopic Imager, APXS and Mossbauer integrations at this site. We’re going to place the IDD in a position so that over the several days that it takes for the flight software upload we can have very long integrations of the instrument. This will point the APXS spectrometer at the ground and the Mossbauer instrument at the sky. The other activities include a PanCam mosaic of the Columbia hills as well as a Mini-TES and PanCam observations of targets known as Herbert, Backlot, Everest and Pisa. Also, we’re positioning the PanCam mast for a morning observation ahead sunrise tomorrow morning.

It’s sol 72 at Opportunity in Meridiani Planum and we’re heading to the northeast extreme of Anatolia with remote sensing at two stops along the way. Those two stops are called Bosphorus and Sangarius. We are planning about 54 meters total of driving today and remote sensing with both of those. At the end of this we’ll also be ready for our flight software upload.

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