On sol 52, which ended at 3:54 p.m. PST, February 25, rover engineers drove Spirit the short 4-meter (13.1 feet) drive to "Middle Ground" after finishing observations with the miniature thermal emission and Moessbauer spectrometers. Several stutter steps that would have put Spirit at the exact target location were not executed because they were programmed with built-in safeties. The rover detected slight hazards and stopped within its constraints. The final steps will be executed next sol.
Waking up to Foreigner's "Cold as Ice," Spirit's first job of the sol was to warm up its arm that was significantly colder than yestersol due to the rover's orientation to the northwest. The engineering team also took a moment to wave to Spirit as its panoramic camera faced and imaged Earth. Spirit will remain at "Middle Ground" for the next several sols and continue observing targets with its spectrometers and microscopic imager. Plans also call for high-resolution images of rocks and an examination of the soil.
Opportunity Status for sol 31 Opportunity Gets an Attitude Adjustment posted Feb. 25, 10:15 am PST
On sol 31, which ended at 3:36 a.m. Wednesday, February 25, Opportunity awoke to "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and his Comets. At 1:00 a.m. Local Solar Time, Opportunity sent data to Earth via the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter and then sent another whopping 145.6 megabits of data at 3:30 a.m. Local Solar Time via the Mars Odyssey orbiter.
During the morning hours, Opportunity collected data with the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer for five hours and took measurements with its miniature thermal emission spectrometer from inside its newly formed hole that was created on sol 30 by the rock abrasion tool. Later, Opportunity retracted and closed the door of the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer and swapped the Moessbauer spectrometer into the hole made by the abrasion tool for a leisurely 24-hour observation.
Opportunity also updated its "attitude knowledge," which fine-tunes the rover's information about its exact location and position on Mars. Updating the attitude knowledge allows the rover to more accurately point the high gain antenna toward Earth, which increases the communications capabilities. The attitude adjustment also enables scientists and engineers to point instruments onboard Opportunity more precisely at targets of interest, such as particular rocks and patches of soil. To adjust the attitude knowledge, engineers have the rover turn the panoramic camera to the Sun and watch the Sun travel across the sky for 15 minutes. The rover is then smart enough to take the Sun movement data collected from the panoramic camera to calculate its own location in the universe..on Mars. The rover gathers attitude knowledge errors over time as it drives and uses the robotic arm extensively, but it only needs an attitude adjustment about once a week or after driving long distances.
Around 12:15 pm Local Solar Time, Opportunity went to sleep to recharge its batteries from its strenuous rock abrasion tool activities on sol 30, but reawakened briefly at 4 p.m. Local Solar Time and again in the evening to send data to Earth via additional overflights by the Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey orbiters.
The plan for sol 32, which ends at 4:15 a.m. Thursday, February
26, is to take another unique set of Moessbauer measurements to look at the rover-created hole in a different spectrum. The goal is to then crawl slightly forward on sol 33 to position Opportunity to use the rock abrasion tool on the upper target of the El Capitan/McKittrick area.