[X] My Assistant

[OWW]

Hi, this is Jeff Fabretto and this is October 12th’s Flight Director report for Spirit and Opportunity. Both vehicles are doing excellently. They’re both in good health.

Spirit’s continuing to drive up the hill, drive up the Columbia Hills and I want to talk more about Opportunity today, that’s MER-B, and right now, for the last few sols we’ve been trying to approach a rock called ‘Wopmay’ and it kinda looks like this brain, it’s not a brain though… And we’ve been approaching it, but we’re on a slope, so we’ve been slipping and sliding and slipping and sliding and every time we try to approach it we slide a little bit more, so we backed up again and that makes us slide and we turn and that makes us slide. Over the last couple of days we’ve been attempting to approach this. We’ve been sliding too much, we think we’ve it nailed today. The image I’m gonna show you, you can see all of our footprints and where we’ve slid around. And it’s very interesting to see that we try to control this vehicle from 250 million miles away and sometimes we don’t hit it right and then we have to back it up and keep trying, but today we’ll see if we have some success.

And that’s the Flight Director report for October 12th 2004.