2004 04 01, April 1st, 2004 Options

[OWW]

Hello, it’s Thursday April 1st 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 moving into its 87th sol and today it backed off of ‘Mazatzal’ rock and started its drive away from ‘Bonneville’ crater headed towards ‘Columbia’ hills. We were planning for a 60 meter drive today, but sequencing and timeouts and other things conspired to only allow us to drive about 36 and a half meters of that. That’s still great progress though and we’re looking forward to a few more drive sols on Spirit which will get us closer to the ‘Columbia’ hills.

On the other side of the planet on Opportunity it’s sol 67 and we are spending our third day at ‘Bounce’ rock. Today is another spectrometry and Microscopic Imager day at ‘Bounce’ rock, looking at a few different targets called ‘Eiffel’, ‘Lowerly’ and ‘Fips’. So we’ll be examing those targets and then setting out on our trek towards ‘Endurance’ crater.

And that is the Flight Director update for today.