Spirit Sol 66

My new distance record didn't last very long. Today they put about 40m on the wheels, although the autonav got spooked again. So they ended up making about 30m of progress, or 25m after accounting for slip (we're now heading up the outer slope of the rim). We didn't make it to the rim; we have another 25m or so still to go before we reach the target point.

Still, that was enough to enable us to see significantly more of the crater. We can see a good chunk of the crater's inner slope and floor. And we can see the backshell, which landed inside the crater, near the top of the far wall.

We're interplanetary litterbugs!

---

Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. A post-drive NAVCAM image looking across the rim of Bonneville. On the far side, in the upper right of this image, the sun glints off of the backshell -- part of the spacecraft Spirit rode to Mars.

---