[X] My Assistant

[OWW]

Hello, welcome to the Mars Exploration Rover Flight Director report. Today is May 11th 2004.

We just finished sol 126 on MER-A Spirit. Today was a touch and go day. Which means that we use the IDD arm and place the APXS spectrometer down, the Mossbauer down, did some integration on both, one after the other. And the we used the Microscopic Imager, the microscope, to take some images of the terrain in front of us. It should be less of a drive today, about 73 meters today. We don’t have all the data down, so we are not sure exactly how that all went yet. We should know in about half an hour now. We’re gonna take it a little bit easier today. Instead of the recordbreaking, at least for Spirit, recordbreaking drive of 123.7 meters, we’ll probably only get about 73 meters today. The goal is to charge up our batteries so on the next day, sol 127, we can hopefully break some records in terms of one day distances.

On the other side of the planet, MER-B Opportunity is at a rock known as Lion Stone. They’ve done some Mossbauer integrations and then they took a microscopic image of Lion Stone and you can see that image behind me to the right here. We don’t have a science analysis yet, but it looks like there’s a blueberry kind of embedded in the rock there. Definitely gonna be looking forward to hearing what the scientists have to say about that. And we’re currently doing an APXS integration. Afterwards we’ll continue the drive around Endurance crater. We’re about an eighth of the way around on the counterclockwise drive all away around the crater. They’ll take images all around the rim.

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