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MARSDAILY
Spirit Scuffs

File photo of Spirit's arm.

 Pasadena CA (JPL) Jul 14, 2005
 Over the Fourth of July weekend, Spirit completed a robotic-arm campaign which had some surprising results.

It turned out that targets at "Independence Rock" seem to have less iron than expected. This result prompted the science team to take a closer look.

On sol 536 (July 6), because the grinding teeth on the rock abrasion tool are worn, the rover team decided to remove some of the surface area by scuffing it with the front left wheel.

The scuff worked as follows:

  1. Spirit moved into position with a turn in place.
  2. Rotated only the front left wheel - reverse 1 radian.
  3. Rotated only the front left wheel - forward 2 radians.
  4. Rover used onboard visual odometry.
  5. Repeated steps 2 through 4, two more times.
  6. Turned in place back to the starting position in order to present the "scuff" to the robotic-arm workspace.

Since the rover gets better alpha particle X-ray spectrometer and Moessbauer spectrometer spectral readings when we let them run long (more than 10 hours for the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer and more than 20 hours for the Moessbauer spectrometer).

The rest of the weekend (sols 538 to 541) will be dedicated to work using the instruments on the robotic arm.

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MARSDAILY
Spirit Heading To 'Home Plate'
 Pasadena CA (JPL) Jan 09, 2006
 Last week Spirit completed robotic-arm work on "El Dorado." The rover used all three of its spectrometers plus the microscopic imager for readings over the New Year's weekend.








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