Daily Updates - February 22, 2004
Spirit Status at end of sol 49

Spirit continued its inspection of the trench dubbed "Road Cut" during the rover's 49th sol, ending at 1:56 p.m. Sunday, PST. It used three instruments on its robotic arm to examine the subsurface soil exposed by the sol 47 digging of the trench.

Before dawn on sol 49, Spirit switched from its Moessbauer spectrometer to its alpha particle X-ray spectrometer for analysis of soil on the trench floor. Later, controllers played "Coisinha do Pai," by Beth Carvalho, as wake-up music. The rover inspected targets on the wall and floor of the trench with its microscope, then placed the Moessbauer spectrometer against a target on the trench wall for identifying the iron-bearing minerals there. The miniature thermal emission spectrometer took remote readings on the rover's wheel tracks in the morning and afternoon.

Plans for sol 50 (ending at 2:35 p.m. Monday, PST) call for finishing inspection of the trench, then resuming the journey toward the rim of a crater dubbed "Bonneville," followed by a longer drive the following sol.

Spirit Daily Update Archive