[X] My Assistant

[OWW]

Hello, this is George Chen with the Flight Director report for Thursday July 22nd 2004.

Today is sol 196 on MER-A Spirit. We start out by doing some Microscopic Images of ‘Sabre’ which is the rock that we are in front of right now and we just recently drilled a hole with the Rock Abrasion Tool, the so-called RAT, into it. So we placed the Alpha Proton X-ray Spectrometer on the target and we began the integration of that toward the end of sol 195 but we ran out of time so we had to finish that up today on sol 196. And on the upcoming sol, sol 197, we will place the Mossbauer spectrometer on the same Rock Abrasion Tool hole and then we’ll take some remote science images and then take some miroscopic imges of our next target still on ‘Sabre’ before wrapping up the day.

On the other side of the planet MER-B Opportunity is currently in the morning of sol 176. As you recall, Opportunity is still exploring the side of Endurance crater. On sol 175 we used the IDD arm to take some microscopic images of a rock called ‘Arnold Ziffel’. We stowed the IDD arm, drove backwards about two meters, collected some remote science and then drove about three meters forward toward another rock target. Sol 176 we will be starting out with some microscopic images of ‘Track 2’ which is a structure that appears to be part of the ‘Razorback’ feature that we’ve seen sofar. And then we’ll drive forward to our next target called ‘Diamond Jenness’ and then we will take some remote science and then shut down with a deep sleep at the end of the sol.

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