Daily Updates - February 21, 2004
Spirit Status at end of sol 48

On its 48th sol, ending at 1:16 p.m. Saturday, PST, Spirit maneuvered its robotic arm successfully within the challengingly tight confines of the trench that the rover had dug into the floor of "Laguna Hollow" the preceding sol.

Spirit used the microscopic imager on the arm to take pictures of details in the wall and floor of the trench during the morning. Then Spirit rotated the tool turret at the end of its arm and placed the Moessbauer spectrometer in position to read the mineral composition of the soil on the trench floor. That reading was designed to last about 12 hours, from mid-sol into the martian night. Spirit's panoramic camera and miniature thermal emission spectrometer were also used during the sol for studies of sky and rocks.

Spirit has been told to wake up and switch from the Moessbauer spectrometer to alpha particle X-ray spectrometer on the trench floor during the pre-dawn hours of the next sol. Later on sol 49 (which ends at 1:56 p.m. Sunday) and early on sol 50, plans call for using those spectrometers on the walls of the trench and making additional observations of the "Laguna Hollow" area. Then Spirit is slated to resume its trek toward the rim of the crater nicknamed "Bonneville," now estimated to be about 135 meters (443 feet) northeast of the rover's current location.

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