MER Rover status report Week Ending August 10, 2002

It’s been almost impossible to even write a news update this week,
since we’ve been so busy. We’re in the middle of a test with the FIDO
rover. FIDO is a rover similar to the ones that we’ll be sending to
Mars, and it’s one that we can send out into real field settings to
do real geology. Right now it’s somewhere in the American Southwest
(I don’t know where), and we’re driving it every day as if it were on
Mars. The reason I don’t know where it is is that this is a “blind”
test. When we run the real rovers on Mars we’re not going to know
very much at all about where they really are, so making the test
blind like this — not telling the science team where the rover is —
is the only realistic way to do the test.

We’re three days into a 10-day test as I write this, and it’s going
wonderfully so far. The geology at the “landing site” is fantastic,
the rover is working well, and the team is working well together.
Watch this website for updates… as soon as we have some images from
the test that we can post, we’ll put ’em here.