[X] My Assistant

[OWW]

Good morning, my name is Joel Signorelli. This is the Flight Director’s Report for the fifth of May.

For Spirit it’s sol 831. Spirit has been at its present location on ‘Low Ridge’ since sol 805 and that’s where it’s going to spend the Martian winter. Now the rover drivers have actually tilted the vehicle so we’ve got a ten degree north tilt and that’s actually enabling more solar energy to come on the array, about 50 watt hours per day more than we were getting before. So that’s going to help the vehicle withstand the Martian winter hopefully.
And in this present location scientists are eager to look at this geographically geologically interesting area over the winter, so they have started what is called their winter science campaign.

On Opportunity it’s sol 810. Now we’ve been trying to drive as much as possible with this vehicle. In the past week we’ve been averaging around 30 meters per drive sol, which puts us around 1200 meters from Victoria Crater. In the next few weeks scientists are anticipating actually seeing the rim of Victoria Crater appearing in the southern horizon.
This past week, we deployed the instrument arm onto a surface called Brookville. And on Brookville we took some microscopic imaging first, then used the RAT brush to remove some of the dust off of it and finally finished off with some Moessbauer and APXS integration.

So that’s what’s been happening on Mars and my name is Joel Signorelli.