Daily Updates - March 29, 2004
Spirit Status at end of sol 84

The angular nature of the rock called "Mazatzal" required some extra rodent power over the weekend. The latest grind by Spirit's rock abrasion tool (the RAT) resulted in the deepest human-made hole on another planet - nearly 8 millimeters (0.31 inches.) The rover was inspired to tackle the target "Brooklyn" right next to its "New York" bull's-eye by the Beastie Boys' "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" on its 83rd sol, which ended at 12:22 p.m. PST on March 28.

Spirit's 84th sol, which ended at 1:01 p.m. PST on March 29, was planned as a day of investigation. The miniature thermal emission spectrometer and panoramic camera made successful observations of the crater informally named "Bonneville," but planned operations of the rover arm were not executed due to a switch on the Moessbauer spectrometer getting momentarily stuck. After a successful Moessbauer integration, the instrument was pulled back from Mazatzal, but one of two contact switches did not indicate a no-contact condition. Although the instrument had been retracted, the rover's software interpreted this as an unexpected collision of the spectrometer with an object, so it terminated any further arm operations. The stuck switch flipped about three minutes later but the rover is programmed to wait until the false error is cleared by mission control.

On sol 85, Spirit will retake microscope images of areas on Mazatzal, and overnight Moessbauer and alpha particle X-ray spectrometer integrations will be repeated.

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