This is planetary radio.

This is planetary radio. Mars has the spirit and opportunity is knocking at the door.

Hi everyone I'm at Mars has the spirit and opportunity is knocking at the door.

Hi everyone I'm Matt Kaplan.

This week we have a great conversation with Mark Adler,

mission manager for the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit.

Bruce Betts definitely has the Spirit, along with this week's trivia contest,

now awarding our stunningly beautiful planetary radio t-shirts. We'll also hear brief greetings from the current

student astronauts. Pairs of these lucky teens are coming from around the world each

week joining the rover science team at the Jet Propulsion Lab.

Why, here's one of them now.

I'll be right back with Mark Adler. Hello, I'm Thomas Kogan. I'm one of the student astronauts. I in Spain I'm 14 years old and well I I really

like space exploration and well Mars especially so this is a great opportunity for me to see what JPL is like inside and to see how scientists work in mission operations.

So I think the planetary society has given us a great opportunity.

We're calibrating some sundial images.

We're making like a movie of the time on Mars,

so we'll start like at 9 a.m.

And you'll see the shadow moving until 5 or 7 p.m. or something like that.

And then, well, we attended the meetings and wrote some journals about what happened today. Mark Adler, thanks very much for taking a moment or two to talk to us at the beginning of your Martian day.

Earth time, Pacific time, it's coming up on 7 PM on, I I don't know what soul do we correspond to on Mars.

Right now we're Saul 13 on Mars.

Which of course is that day on Mars which is about almost 40 minutes longer than ours.

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