[X] My Assistant

[OWW]

Welcome to the Mars Exploration Rover Flight Director report for June 23rd 2004. My name is George Chen, I’m Flight Director for MER-A Spirit.

Today we’re finishing up on sol 168 on MER-A Spirit. We have finally positioned ourselves to get into IDD arm range of a rock known as ‘Pot of Gold’. And you can the latest image from Spirit over my right shoulder here, your left image. We are very interested in looking at this rock at close range and we’ll be able to use the Rock Abrasion Tool to grind into the rock, because it has some interesting characteristics. There appears to be some process that’s hollowing out the inside of the rock that is of interest. And also we can see evidence of some of what looks like the same nodules, the so-called blueberries, that we’ve seen on the other side of the planet. So we’re very interested in taking a good look at this collection of rocks here. It’s been difficult getting up to it. The terrain is very sandy and the slope has been varying as we approach it, so it’s been very difficult to get the rover in the exact right position that we can access with the arm.

On MER-B it is the morning of sol 147 at this time and we’re still at a rock known as ‘Virginia’ at the inside of Endurance crater and we spent the sol using the IDD arm to use the Microscopic Imager, the Alpha Proton X-ray Spectrometer and the Mossbauer spectrometer to take a look at this rock known as ‘Virginia’. You can see an image of that over my left shoulder here, on your right side. And today we expect to use the Rock Abrasion Tool some more to dig some additional holes in the rock to take a look at.

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