[X] My Assistant

[OWW]

Hello, it’s Tuesday July 6th and this is the Flight Director update for the Mars Exploration Rovers. My name is Chris Lewicki and today is actually my last day of giving these Flight Director updates, I’ll be moving on to the Phoenix project which is the next landing mission to land on the surface of Mars. But while there’s still rovers on Mars, we still have updates to give.

It’s sol 181 Spirit, which is one day away from doubling our expected mission lifetime at 182 sols. We had an active weekend over the American independence holiday weekend. Even though the crew got off on Sunday, the rovers continued to work through taking a lot of remote sensing data and continuing their work.
Today on Spirit is a touch and go day on a target called Cookiecutter and then we are stowing and driving to an area called ‘Engineerig Flats’ where we’ll do a number of activities associated with characterising and trying to improve the performance of our right front drive-wheel. Our current odometry on Spirit is 3414 meters.

On the other side of the planet at Meridiani Planum in Endurance crater Opportunity is at sol 160. And today is a pre-Rock Abrasion Tool day and we’re going to be studying the target ‘Drammensfjord’. And also exercising our 23rd deep sleep of the mission. We did a number of RAT activities over the weekend including areas on ‘Kettlestone’ and ‘Grindstone’. And we also had a issue over the weekend with our left rear wheel coming up off the ground a little bit as our rover slipped down our 29 degree slope a little bit differently. That activity yesterday was succesful in bringing all six wheels back to the surface and we can continue with our science investigation of the area in front of us. Opportunities current odometry 1471 meters.

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