Hello, welcome to the Mars report for Thursday August 12th.

On Spirit, Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, sol 216 we just finished the RAT operation on the rock ‘Clovis’. Got an eight millimeter hole in that rock after 2.5 hours of drilling. The plan for the next sol, sol 217, will be doing a Microscopic Imager observationset of the RAT hole. And then finishing off with a APXS spectrometer observation of that same RAT hole.

On the other side of the planet, Opportunity, it’s sol 196 and we just finished a Mossbauer spectrometer readout on the rock ‘Bila’ and on that same sol we drove back half a meter to put the near edge of the rock ‘Bila’ in our instrument arm workspace and the plan for sol 197 will be to do the IDD operations this near edge of the rock ‘Bila’ which has a mineral vein that is enticing to scientists.

And that’s it for the Mars report for today.