Mars Exploration Rover Update #2 - March 7, 2005

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status.html

OPPORTUNITY UPDATE: Opportunity Continues South with New Mobility
Software -
sol 380-388, March 07, 2005

After a busy week of driving with new mobility software, Opportunity
continues to be in excellent health. The rover has traveled 450 meters
(just over a quarter of a mile) in 6 sols. Opportunity took a couple of
breaks from the trek south to use the tools on its robotic arm for
investigating of a rock called "Russet" and to image a crater triplet.
Atmospheric opacity has been stable, with tau hovering between 0.85 and
0.90.

Sol-by-sol summaries:

On sol 380, Opportunity placed its Mossbauer spectrometer on Russet for
a five-hour integration, with remote sensing in parallel. The rover
then
switched to the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer for an eight-hour
overnight integration.

On sol 381 Opportunity took one microscopic image of Russet, stowed the
arm and bumped back for some remote sensing of the same target, then
went for an approximately 60-meter (197-foot) drive to the crater
"Jason."

Sol 382 was the second sol of a two-sol plan. Opportunity performed two
hours of remote sensing.

The plan for sols 383 through 385 contained a first-time activity: to
drive on all three sols over the weekend. On sol 383 there was a
record-breaking 105-meter (344-foot) blind drive, in which the rover
follows a route determined in advance by rover planners, followed by 72
meters (236 feet) of autonomous navigation, in which the rover chooses
its own route around any obstacles it recognizes in images taken along
the way. Sol 384 continued with 104 meters (341 feet) of autonomous
navigation. Finally, Sol 385 completed the plan with an additional 109
meters (358 feet) of autonomously.

Autonomous navigation collects 15 megabytes to 25 megabytes of data per
hour by imaging the passing terrain. (This would allow mobility
engineers to reconstruct what happened if the drive faulted out.) As a
result, flash memory was filled almost to the brim on sol 385, and sol
386 added only 6 megabytes of science data (all atmospheric science).

On sol 387, with a bit more free data volume to work with, and the team
planned an approximately 80-meter (262-foot) drive to end up at a group
of three small craters. The team also told Opportunity to use its
navigation camera after the drive to take images for providing a
360-degree panorama of the craters.

The plan for sol 388, ending on Feb. 25, is to repeat the 6-megabyte
atmospheric-science observations.

Current odometry total: 3014.77 meters (1.87 miles)