Spirit Sol 59

Opportunity found unmistakable signs of water, it turns out. It's even on the news, despite the fact that it's an election day. As I'm showering, they're having the press conference. I picked the wrong day to sleep in.

The RATting didn't go as planned yestersol. It's not hard to predict my reaction: this must be my fault. But it isn't; Jeng assures me that the IDD sequence was fine. The likely cause is that the RAT team picked particularly aggressive settings for the drilling operation, expecting the rock to be very hard, and this led to terminating the drilling after only 20 minutes. So they're trying again tomorrow.

The ops teams continue to think about the extended mission, and in fact they're going to try a little of it. A couple of sols from now, they're going to try planning two sols in a single day, which is probably what we'll be doing in extended ops. This should be interesting.

Since I'm not on shift, I relax a little and catch up on the images I've missed. I listen in as Jennifer Trosper laments that Opportunity is getting all the glory; she seems to think it's been that way for some time. Some people seem to have assumed that we never recovered from the anomaly. She relates a question someone recently asked her: "Why don't we hear anything about Spirit? Is Spirit dead now?"

I sigh deeply.