Spirit Status on Sol 598

Spirit is in good health, power positive and has no issues. This week the telecom team changed Spirit's uplink rate from 1000 to 2000 bps. In its orbit around the Sun, Mars comes close to Earth for a few months once every 2 years. Mars is now close enough to Earth that the one-way communication travel time from the spacecraft at Mars to the Deep Space Network antennas on Earth is only about 5' away (at light speed). This shorter communication travel time means that the Rover Team has plenty of communication-link margin to support the higher uplink rate. The new uplink rate was successful during the Sol 598 uplink session. Between Sept. 2 and Sept. 8, Spirit drove to another imaging location and completed the second stereo imaging campaign then returned to "Irvine" in order to explore what might be a dike, which is a crack-like cut that often forms when magma from a volcano travels through or over another rock. Spirit also performed more observations of the Martian Moons and completed 3 days of Mössbauer spectrometer readings on the capture magnets.