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Pasadena CA (JPL) Jul 19, 2010
Opportunity's driving campaign toward Endeavour Crater has benefitted from a recent solar array dust-cleaning event.
The rover began the past reporting week with a drive of just over 68 meters (223 feet) on Sol 2295 (July 8, 2010).
The rover then spent the weekend conducting a robotic arm campaign on a surface target called "Juneau Road Cut," collecting both Microscopic Imager (MI) image stacks and an Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) integration.
On Sol 2298 (July 11, 2010), Opportunity's solar arrays experienced a dust-cleaning event. This boosted energy production to over 400 watt-hours (a 100-watt light bulb that burns for one hour uses 100 watt-hours of electricity).
The previous week, solar array output was about 350 watt hours per day. With the extra energy from the Sol 2298 cleaning event, Opportunity was able to perform back-to-back drives on Sols 2299 and 2300 (July 12 and 14, 2010), each over 70 meters (230 feet).
As of Sol 2300 (July 14, 2010), solar array energy production has improved to 492 watt-hours, atmospheric opacity (Tau) was 0.223 and the solar array dust factor improved to 0.700.
Total odometry is 21,760.61 meters (21.76 kilometers, or 13.52 miles).
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