[X] My Assistant

[OWW]

Good afternoon, I’m Byron Jones and I’m providing the Flight Director report for the Mars Exploration Rovers on Thursday January 20th.

On Spirit today is sol 373 at the end of the day and earlier we did some micro-imaging on the target ‘Peace’ along with the RAT-brush and right now we’re in the middle of an overnight APXS integration. Tomorrow we’ll be stopping that integration and doing some RAT-ting on the target ‘Peace’. Some of the issues right now with Spirit; We’re taking a closer look at the tau values, a measurement of how much dust is in the atmosphere, has been increasing from an average level of 0.3 up to 1.3, causing lower energy input.

On the other side of the planet Opportunity is on sol 353 in the middle of the day. Right now they’re doing some micro-imaging of a meteor found near the heatshield and based on other analysis this has been found to be made up of mostly iron. Tomorrow they’ll be driving towards the main piece of the heatshield to investigate that further.

And that is what’s going on on Mars today.