[X] My Assistant

[OWW]

Well, my name is Scott Doudrick. Today is May 13th and this is the Flight Director’s report for the Mars Exploration rover.

First I’d like to talk about Spirit. We’re continuing our drive towards the East Hills. In the imaging that we now have you can see that the slopes are getting close enough that no longer do they look like just smooth terrain with nothing on it, you can now start resolving rocks which must be very large from this distance which you can start to see speckles and things that look like rocks. And there is definate layering that we’re able to see now. So it’s getting exciting the closer we get. We’re now just slightly under a kilometer away. And we’re continuing every sol to try to push a little bit closer. Tomorrow we should get about 50 more meters and hopefully within the next month or so we’ll be showing you some amazing images from right underneath those slopes.

On Opportunity they just completed sol 107 and they’re starting sol 108. On sol 107 they RAT-ted an area called Lion Stone. It’s a rock on the rim of Endurance crater. They did a small amount of Microscopic Imaging and then did the APXS overnight. So this morning, once we uplink the new plan we will do a short Mossbauer, much much more detailed Microscopic Imaging. We’ll back up, do some more imaging with the PanCam and then head counterclockwise or more or less south along the rim towards an outlook called Karatepe which should give us a good view of the inside of the crater which should be about 30 meters away from where we are now.

This is Flight Director for Mars Exploration Rover signing off.