[X] My Assistant

[OWW]

Hello, welcome to the Flight Director report for the Mars Exploration Rovers. Today is May 4th, 2004. My name is George Chen. I’m the Flight Director for MER-A Spirit.

On Spirit today it is sol 119 on Mars and we had a little bit of a disappointing day today. We accidently sent the sequence to tell the rover what to do today at the wrong uplink rate. What happens, we confuse ourselves a little bit when we were playing around with different antennas and uplink rate to try to troubleshoot a signalproblem that we had last week. So the upshot is that the spacecraft never got the new instructions for today and it’s on what’s known as a runout sequence, so it’s kind of a default sequence that we have to maintain engineering and communications and soforth. So, on the good side the spacecraft is healthy and there are no problems, but on the bad side we’re gonna have to redo what we’ve had planned to do today, which is to traverse about 30 meters which will bring us to the lip of Lahontan crater. So hopefully within a sol or two we should be able to have images of the inside of this new crater that we’re poised to look into.

On the other side of the planet, MER-B Opportunity is still at the edge of Endurance crater where it continues to take images with all the remote science instruments of the inside of the crater and one of the images that you can see here to my right is the inside of the crater. The scientists are very excited on what they’re seeing sofar. We’re seeing lots of outcropping and some layering in the terrain there and we’re looking for a very safe place and interesting place where we could possibly drive the rover down into and take a closer look at some of those outcropping and other objects down and inside the crater.

So, that’s about what’s happening on Mars today.