[X] My Assistant

[OWW]

Hello, it’s Monday May 10th and this is the Flight Director update for the Mars Exploration Rovers. My name is Chris Lewicki and I’m working on Spirit today.

It’s sol 125 on Spirit and we’re continuing our long drive to the Columbia Hills. We’re doing this planning in drive-quartets as we call it, so we have four kind of preplanned days and we did days one and two of those over the weekend, broke a new drive record on sol 123 of about 95 meters only to have it broken again today, by a whopping 122 meters bringing the mission total to over two kilometers on the surface now. Yesterday we also had a new activity. You might be familiar with our beeps that we have with the spacecraft everyday to let us know that everything is good and it’s received our sequenceload for the day. Yesterday on Spirit we did a HONK, which is essentially a drive and beep while you’re driving and that worked out well. We drove almost ten meters while we were doing that beep.
Today on Spirit will be a touch and go sol and then more driving to Columbia Hills which are located south, south east. We’re kind of heading 130 degrees in their direction.

At Opportunity it’s sol 105 and Opportunity has completed it’s approach of Lion Stone. This is a rock that is on the outer rim of the south of the crater and our front HazCam view of this location gives us a wonderful view into the crater. Very picturesque. Another image we’ve taken on Opportunity is about due south. We can see our heatshield that we’ve seen from orbit since landing. And later on in the mission we might go approach that heatshield and check out to see how it impacted.
Today on Opportunity is going to be some IDD work on Lion Stone, including images with the Microscopic Imager and APXS and Mossbauer integrations on targets called Kimba, Elsa, Nala and j.. b… And Opportunities odometry is about 1050 meters.

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