Welcome to the Flight Director report for the Mars Exploration Rover. This is May 17th 2004.

Spirit just is in the middle of sol 132 right now. We had a little bit of a glitch on sol 131 however. The day started out normally. We began continuing our drive towards Columbia Hills. But about 12 meters into the drive the computer suffered a spontaneous reboot. This is not unlike pressing Control-Delete on your PC. So the rovercomputer rebooted and basicly sat there waiting for instructions from the Earth. Just to find out what went wrong we opened up an extra comwindow, communications window today sol 132, and we’re able to ascertain that the spacecraft is in good health, there’s no evidence of any damage to the vehicle. No failures or anything like that. At this time the flightsoftware team is over in the testrover doing some attempts to recreate the problem here in Pasadena on our testrovers. So stay tuned for that. We hope this is a minor glitch and we’ll be back driving within a sol or two.

On the other side of the planet MER-B Opportunity is continuing its drive around Endurance crater. It did a 40 meter drive yesterday and so we’re currently about one third of the way around the crater. We’re about one day away from Pan position 2, which is a location where we can take some good high resolution photographs of the interior of the crater. If you want to take a look at traverse map, you can see it in the diagram to my right here.

So, that’s about what’s happening on Mars today.