Good morning, I’m Byron Jones and this is the Flight Director Report for Thursday, October 13th.

On Spirit, today is sol 632. She spent the last week or so at the science target Hillary, which has been interesting from a science perspective as well as an engineering perspective. We’re currently sitting on a slope that is a little bit above 25 degrees. And when we first approached that outcrop, it was a little difficult, we were unstable at first sitting perched up on a rock and we were unable to deploy the instrument arm. But after wiggling our wheels a little bit, we settled down to a stable position where we were able to deploy the arm. And since then, we’ve been spending time doing Alpha Partcile X-ray Spectrometer observations, Moessbauer integration, as well as other remote sensing, taking dust devil movies and doing overnight observations as well.

On the other side of Mars, it’s sol 612 for Opportunity, and she spent the last week or so in restricted sols, meaning we’re planning with day-old data so she can only drive every other day. She has slowly been making her way south along the western side of Erebus Crater, towards the new science target called Payson.

Well that’s it for today, thanks for tuning in. I’m Byron Jones and that’s what’s happening on Mars today.

New place: Payson. Where is it located?

Rodolfo

Had to ask it myself
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...=75&#entry23641

http://athena.cornell.edu/news/mubss/
"The good outcrops at Erebus are on the southeastern rim (called the Vermillion Cliffs) and on the western rim (called the Mogollon Rim). The Vermillion Cliffs look easier to get to, but not as high. The Mogollon Rim exposes more rock, but looks harder to get to. There's a particularly tasty-looking promontory on the Mogollon Rim named Payson that's probably the biggest outcrop anywhere along the rim, but whether we can actually get to it or not is an open question."

Basically it is the outcrops/cliffs visible on the southwest rim of Erebus.

It is visible in this long baseline flicker gif.

This long baseline shows 3D effect on far rim, and seems to bring out some new features. Particularly on the crater seen in the upper far right. You may need to manually center this flicker in your browser window, because one of the the images was very large, and I failed to crop it effectively.

The larger, SOL 590 image, is PIA06341, acquired from NASA's Planetary Journal.
Warning File Size 1.3 MB

590-593-TIF-JPG-PAN-Erebus-longbase-flicker.gif

Jack

Nods to Bill Harris:

We seem to be adopting an Arizona theme in Erebus. Payson is a town near the Colorado Plateau in Arizona.

Here are a couple of identification images that were done last month:

--Bill

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...pe=post&id=1570

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...pe=post&id=1609