Spirit has made 54 meters (177 feet) of forward progress towards the summit of "Husband Hill" this past week. This is excellent progress considering Spirit is on restricted sols, so it can only drive every other sol.
(Restricted sols occur when the timing of the communications pass from the Odyssey orbiter is too late in the sol to gather vital location and health information about the rover after it executed recent commands.
The team back on Earth must wait until the next sol to find out where and how the rover is.) After sol 576's drive, the team was able to determine highest summit point, which is informally named "Summit 1."
Previously, the team believed "Summit 2" was slightly higher. Furthermore, traversing to Summit 2 was deemed difficult, so Spirit is headed towards Summit 1, which is roughly 70 meters (230 feet) away.
Power has been extremely healthy at about 875 to 900 watt-hours per sol. Spirit has been consistently using both morning and evening UHF communications passes with the Odyssey orbiter every sol, which allows the team to acquire and downlink more data.
Sol-by-sol summaries
