National Aeronautics and Space Administration

“ Information is new and they want to check and double check before they make an announcement. Remember we're just on sol 6 going into 7 with Opportunity and we egressed on sol 12 with Spirit. We do have a full panorama from Pancam and we do have one full octant from Mini-TES. I believe we acquired two octants on sol 6 and bits and pieces of other targets. Feeling is to get off the lander and on to the surface, do some soil observation and get over to the outcropping. Tradeoff between acquiring complete pancam and mini-TES panoramas and getting over to that very exciting outcropping. ”

“ Together Olivine, Pyroxene and Magnetite tell us it's a good volcanic rock, an olivine bearing basalt. Is this unusual? We don't know for Mars yet. On Earth it's one of the most common kinds of rocks we find. ”

“ In our current mode, we could go driving if we wanted to. Main limitation if we can't get flash working which we expect to is we couldn't store images over night. We'd have to make sure we get the hazard and pancam images down each day. Once we get flash working it's back to normal operations.
Q. Mark, more on Spirit software. Before you do what you do on Mars are you running the commands on boxes here.
Mark: we have a lot of very tired flight software guys running all of our commands, scripts and software uploads here in testbeds before we send them up to the spacecraft. ”

“ Gave a boost to Spirit guys. Deployed rear wheels, moved rear lander petal down to get our egress path better. Retracted rear airbags and moved lander petal down. Made our egress path better. Now have a very benign egress path. Released rear wheels, that went well. Released middle wheels. Then we deployed, wiggled, and stowed IDD for drive. Tonight doing instrument checks on Mossbauer and APSX, both a functional check to make sure everything still works after the pyro fire for IDD as well as an overnight calibration. Tomorrow, sol 7, we cut the last pyro device of 60 plus devices. ”

“ We really do appreciate engineers rescuing this cool spectrum. Thank you guys. What does it tell us. The positions and peaks tell us about oxidation states and minerology of iron. We only detect iron. ”

“ You've seen spectacular Pancam mosaic from Opportunity taken on sol 2 and 3. Stereo images in 360 degrees. We've processed them and turned them into 3-D model. The process we have applied to get this model is pretty precise and we use a method called barner (?) adjustment that increases accuracy of pointing angles. Next is contour map derived from the 3-D provides elevations. The fact that the lander is inside the crater provides good opportunity to map inside of a crater. Ray Arvidson says first time we've mapped from inside a crater. This data will be used 1. ”