[X] My Assistant

[OWW]

Hello, this is George Chen with the Flight Director report for July 13th 2004.

Today is sol 187 on MER-A Spirit. We finished sol 187. We are still troubleshooting the right front wheel. You probably have heard that we’re having some problems with the current on that right front wheel spiking a little bit. So there may be some indication that the bearing or motor is suffering some age related degradation. So we’ve been doing some troubleshooting with that front wheel. We turned on a heater to try to melt some of the lubricant in the wheel to try to get it to flow back into the gears and bearing to hopefully improve that situation a little bit. Early indications say that it may have helped a little bit although we haven’t driven a whole lot after the heating cycles so it’s hard to say whether it really did improve.
Today, sol 188, we’re planning a sol where we will try to drive with that wheel in that condition. We’re gonna try a couple of things. One, we’re gonna try to drive backwards in the hopes that if the wheel is kinda dragging a little bit and not fully spinning, that having that wheel behind us rather than ahead of us, is a more efficient way to drive. The other thing we’re gonna do is to duty cycle that wheel so that it’s only being powered about ten percent of the time. The thinking is that as we drag that wheel it’s gonna push a little bit of a plow of dirt in front of it, so every ten percent of the time or so we gonna actually rotate the wheel to try to get over that little hump of dirt. So we’ll see how that goes.

On MER-B Opportunity we are finishing sol 167 at this time. We’ve been doing some IDD work, the Instrument Deployment Device. Putting the Microscopic Imager on a magnet near the top of the rover. The magnet is there to capture some of the iron materials that may be in the atmosphere and may be blowing around the rover there. We’re planning sol 168 at this time and that sol we’ll put the Mossbauer spectrometer also on that capture magnet to see what it may have picked up. And also we’ll do some PanCam and Mini-TES remote science.

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