With a whole legion of unmanned spaceflight enthusiasts at this site, it's been a wonderful source of information regarding the activities of the MER rovers (among many other things). But it has not always been so. Looking back at the first threads of the MER Spirit section I found the details of the first 30 or 40 sols fairly sketchy. The section Opportunity had similar, but less severe issues. Can anyone point me to somewhere that has detailed information about the activities of the Rovers for their first few days? Perhaps their original 90-day mission?

The reason I ask is because I am thinking about writing a day-by-day summary of both MER rovers. Huge task, but with as splendid as those missions have been, it's worth doing imho.

Thanks in advance.

Given that the forum started a month after Spirit landed - year, details would be sketchy

http://an.rsl.wustl.edu/mer/ - go to Sol summaries, then documents. The SOWG and Miss.Man. documents are very details and cover details for just about everything.

But the two best ways to relive those early days - at to buy and read 'Roving Mars'. And read this http://marsandme.blogspot.com/ All of it. From the beginning.

Thank-you so much for those links!

Yeah I figured that was the case.

You can also use A.J.S. Rayl's news reports, which are the most consistently in-depth (admittedly, sometimes overwhelmingly so) of any MER reporting on the Web:
http://www.planetary.org/news/subjects/mar...ion_rovers/2004
http://www.planetary.org/news/subjects/mar...ion_rovers/2005
http://www.planetary.org/news/subjects/mar...ion_rovers/2006
http://www.planetary.org/news/subjects/mar...ion_rovers/2007
http://www.planetary.org/news/subjects/mar...ion_rovers/2008
http://www.planetary.org/news/subjects/mar...ion_rovers/2009

Unfortunately, the updates prior to November 1, 2005 are mostly lacking images (because that's when we moved over to the new website design) but if you search on names of rocks and so forth you'll find the corresponding images pretty easily.

--Emily