Last Friday afternoon, the flight team transmitted the C7 sequence to Surveyor. This sequence became active at 7:00 a.m. PDT on Monday, April 21st and contains commands that will control the spacecraft for the next 28 days.

Late in the evening on Monday, Surveyor transmitted 1.5 gigabytes of recorded data back to Earth. This data was collected by the Magnetometer science instrument two weeks ago during the solar flare eruption. The playback of the data took five hours to complete and represents nearly 52 hours of recorded science. On Tuesday, the spacecraft repeated the five-hour data transmission for redundancy purposes.

No other major activities occurred this week. After a mission elapsed time of 169 days from launch, Surveyor is 84.32 million kilometers from the Earth, 40.49 million kilometers from Mars, and is moving in an orbit around the Sun with a velocity of 24.23 kilometers per second. This orbit will intercept Mars 139 days from now, slightly after 6:00 p.m. PDT on September 11th (01:00 UTC, September 12th). The spacecraft is currently executing the C7 command sequence, and all systems continue to be in excellent condition.

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Status report prepared by:

Office of the Flight Operations Manager
Mars Surveyor Operations Project
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, CA 91109
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