Opportunity Sol 569 (Spirit Sol 589)

First day of school. There's a line a mile long -- backed up all the way to the freeway -- along the road we share with a couple of local high schools. I cleverly go down to the next exit, which turns out to be not so clever because there's a huge line there. There's another school on that hill. The clever rover driver forgot.

What with one thing and another, I'm about five minutes late. Which I think is no big deal, since there's no way we're driving.

Except, of course, that it turns out we are driving.

Great!

Not very far, though. I notice Dan's skeleton plan allocates only one hour for driving. "What can you do with one hour -- blind driving only?" he asks me. As part of the "baby steps" plan for getting back to normal, we're under an IMHO ridiculous temporary prohibition against using the PMA while driving.

"Not much," I tell him. "Especially since we can't go more than about five meters without slip checks, and we need the PMA for those."

"That's okay," Emily Eelkema interjects. "Five meters is fine. We just want to use all the motor control boards and actuate the steering and drive motors."

Well, fine by me. Actuating the steering and drive motors is what I'm here for. I plan a drive the easy way -- take the one we were prevented from doing on sols 563 and 567, and chop away all but the first 5m or so. Looks like we will do this drive, after all. One piece at a time.

[Next post: sol 591 (Opportunity sol 573), September 1.]