[X] My Assistant

[OWW]

Hello and welcome to the Mars Exploration Rover Flight Director report for Friday August 6th 2004.

Today is the 211th day on the surface of Mars for MER-A Spirit. We are continuing to explore this area next to a target that we’re trying to drive to called ‘Clovis’. And just to bring you up to date on a couple of things that happened the last few sols, on sol 209 we had an unexpected reboot of the rover flight computer. This is a known software bug that caused this, similar to the ones happened on sol 131. We don’t believe it’s a threat to the vehicle’s safety. It is a little bit of an unconvenience however. On sol 210 we successfully drove to a rocktarget known as ‘Clovis’ and you can see that in the image behind me, kind of a whitish flat rock there. This is an area that is of particular interest to the scientists and we had to drive up a very steep piece of terrain to get there, about 25 degree inclination to drive up there. So we are successfully at ‘Clovis’ right now and we will spend sol 211 doing some remote sensing in preparation for some IDD arm work in the subsequent sols.

On the other side of the planet, MER-B Opportunity is still exploring the interior of Endurance crater. Sol 190 we drove further down into the crater, and today, sol 191, we’ll drive another 5.5 meters toward a target known as ‘Axel Heiberg’ which is a very good rock target on the way to ‘Burns cliff’ which is our ultimate destination along the rim of the crater.

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