Hello, it’s Friday May 7th and this is the Flight Director update for the Mars Exploration Rovers. My name is Chris Lewicki and I’m the Flight Director for Opportunity today.

Spirit is on sol 122 and it’s just recently passed one mile in total odometry. We added 65 meters of driving today in our touch and go sol and we are now at 1734 meters. So we are looking forward to more driving as we go towards Columbia Hills.

Opportunity on the other side of the planet had a very important day today. We demonstrated that we can successfully use a new capability in our new flightsoftware called deep sleep. And this allows us to essentially turn off all power to the rover overnight and get us around wasting energy on a stuck-on heater that Opportunity has on its robotic arm. So now that we know that this works we can Op-use it in the future if we want to save energy or not. This day was a test and we’ll continue operating normally from now on.
In terms of activities today Opportunity is gonna start its drive counterclockwise around Endurance crater and we expect to add another 55 meters of odometry today.

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