Hello, this is the update for the Mars Exploration Rovers, my name is Chris Lewicki and I’m the Flight Director for Opportunity. Today is sol 91 on Spirit and sol 71 on Opportunity. Spirit and Opportunity both had busy days over the weekend.

I’ll start with Spirit at Gusev crater. Its primary objective was to approach a target called Route 66 and position ourselves at a good attitude in preparation for the flight software load which will be happening in a few days.
Spirit also hit two more milestones over the weekend. The first of which is achieving its mission success criteria of driving 600 meters. We are now at 637 meters on Spirit and planning on putting a lot more milage on. The other criteria that was met is now Spirit has completed its nominal mission of 91 days on the surface of Mars and it is officially entering its extended mission. We look forward to many more sols on Spirit as we’re driving towards Columbia hills.
Overnight Spirit will be placing the Mossbauer and Microscopic Imager on its calibration targets at the front of the rover and switching over to the APXS tool. And like I said getting ready for the flight software upload.

Opportunity on the other side of the planet is now approaching a feature called Anatolia on its way to Endurance crater. Opportunity also had a big milestone reached over the weekend with our recordsetting longest drive of 100.4 meters. We hope we can drive a few more times like this but this is certainly the longest we’ve driven today.
Today Opportunity will be driving about 16.5 meters to do some final close approach and drive along some of the gullies in Anatolia which the science team is interested looking at. And we’ll also be parking ourselves in preparation for the flight software upload happening in the upcoming days.

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