[X] My Assistant

[OWW]

Hello, this is the Mars Exploration Rover Flight Director report for May 5th 2004. My name is George Chen, I’m Flight Director for MER-A Spirit.

Today is sol 120 on MER-A Spirit. We did a successful sol today, much better than sol 119. We successfully uploaded the sequence. Its seems like we’ve finished troubleshooting our communicationsproblems and we had a very successful day. We traversed about 30 meters and that brings us to the lip of Lahontan crater. So we did most of the drive.The last 85 centimeters the rover decided not to perform because it looked like there was a steep dropoff of about 20 centimeters which was in fact safe but the rover was playing it extra careful and decided not to do the last 85 centimeters, but that’s ok. So, anyway, we took some pictures and we should have them down shortly, we don’t have them quite yet. So look on our website for those as they come down.

On the other side of the planet, on MER-B, they continued taking some remote sensing of Endurance crater. They’ve been taking a lot of images and are now trying to assess the accessability of the crater to get to some of the interesting sites along the rim of the crater. This coming sol, sol 100, they’re gonna be taking some images with a longer stereo baseline. In the past we’ve been just using the PanCam … separated the two PanCam cameras. They’re separated .28 meters. This time we’re gonna actually take an image in the traverse for about 1.5 meters to take us another image. And this will allow us to get better depth, slope and roughness estimates so we can assess how safe it is to drive into the crater.

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