[X] My Assistant

[OWW]

Hi, this is Jeff Fabretto and this is September 22nd and this is the Flight Director report for the Mars Exploration Rovers. Both vehicles are in good health and they’re doing fine. We’re just coming out of this conjunction period, which means Mars is finally swinging around the Sun and it’s coming closer to Earth, so we’ve got a lot better commandability and we can get a lot more information from the spacecraft.
During this conjunction period we didn’t send, normally we send information from Mars to a spacecraft called Odyssey and Odyssey relays that information back to Earth. But during this conjunction period we only send only very small amount of data back, just to assess the health of the vehicle. Now, tonight, we’ll be sending a lot more data back and we’re finally back on regular science masters and we’re able to do some things.

Spirit is still doing remote sensing. They still have very little data coming back. Opportunity though got right back to business, we drove towards another science spot, a rock called ‘Auk’ and we placed our IDD, our robotic arm, on this and we’re gonna start to take some readings on that rock and tonight we’re gonna have a 128K, which is a big data pass, so we should be able to get right back into normal operations here without problem.

And that’s the Flight Director report for September 22nd 2004.