MER Status Week Ending March 15, 2003

This week marked one of the most important milestones since we started
this thing more than seven years ago. The second MER rover and its
Athena payload arrived in Florida.

Since the summer of 1999 we’ve been putting weekly news updates on
this web site. We’ve had a lot of ups and downs over that span,
including some times when it looked like maybe we weren’t ever going
to get our payload to the launch pad at all. And now, after years of
effort by hundreds of scientists and engineers, everything is at Cape
Canaveral. It’s an incredible feeling. This picture, taken by Goestar
Klingelhoefer, shows the last of the trucks rolling through the gate
at Kennedy Space Center… with me on my cell phone giving the news to
the folks back home.

We’re now less than eleven weeks away from our first launch.