NASA Mars Rover Spirit Status 23 February 2007

Spirit Continues Driving While Engineers Check Robotic Arm

Spirit Status for sol 1113-1117

Release Date: 2/23/07

Spirit is healthy and making progress on the return trek to “Home Plate.” Rover handlers have put use of the robotic arm on hold in order to run diagnostic tests of apparent positioning errors in the placement of instruments on the arm. Meanwhile, Spirit continues driving, searching for dust devils and clouds using WATCH computer commands, and acquiring other remote sensing data.

Sol-by-sol summary

In addition to daily observations that included measuring atmospheric opacity caused by dust with the panoramic camera, scanning the sky for clouds with the navigation camera, surveying the sky and ground with the miniature thermal emission spectrometer, and taking reference images of the sky, Spirit conducted the following activities:

Sol 1113 (Feb. 19, 2003): Spirit acquired full-color images, using all 13 filters of the panoramic camera, of a knobby rock known as “Fabien” and targets known as “Kadabra” and “Kaol.”

Sol 1114: Spirit rolled slightly backward, turned, and drove 8.61 meters (28.3 feet) toward Home Plate. Spirit searched for dust devils using the WATCH commands.

Sol 1115: Spirit acquired movie frames in search of dust devils and searched for clouds using the WATCH commands.

Sol 1116: Spirit drove 8 meters (26 feet), acquired westward-looking and northward-looking images after the drive, and acquired thermal data from a soil target known as “Kabal” using the miniature thermal emission spectrometer.

Sol 1117 (Feb. 23, 2007): Spirit acquired full-color images of the area in front of the rover using all 13 filters of the panoramic camera.

Odometry

As of sol 1114 (Feb. 20, 2007), Spirit’s total odometry was 6,969.03 meters (4.33 miles).