"Mission Update"

         The story I have chose for this week's blog is "Mission Update", who's speaker is astronaut Steve Squyres. This particular story is about exploration in space, specifically on the planet Mars. The familiarity about this story and the last is that they are both about exploring a 'new world', but instead of writing down information to gain riches, Squyres is simply writing to inform the reader, which is also the purpose of the story. Another big difference is that he is blogging from space and is expressing his emotions and opinions about what he is experiencing at that moment. The tone he is uses throughout the entire story is happiness and excitement. This is also a first-hand account and he is blogging his narrative in modern day chronological order. His blog post  starts off with him expressing enthusiasm about seeing the Victoria Crater. One important event in this blog, is the landing of Opportunity on Victoria Crater.
         As the story continues, he writes about the rover taking picture one by one as it slowly moves to another location throughout the crater. Another extraordinary event, is when he blogs that Mars will be hidden behind the sun known as "superior conjuction" and that will cause it to be extremely difficult to communicate with NASA Officials on Earth. The occasion takes place in 2006 during the landing on Mars and they have decided that after the conjuction they will move on to Cape Verde for new pictures. At first, they had planned to explore both Cape Verde and Capo Frio, but after comparing them together they decided that Cape Verde is the better choice. The main audience of this story is the world since he isn't writing for one specific person, he's writing for everyone to see his blog. Throughout the story, Steve Squyres main subject is about the landing of Opportunity and life on Mars. The reason I have chosen this specific story is because unlike the other stories we have read, he isn't writing down information to persuade or to gain something in return. On the contrary, he's writing it all down for anyone who has the chance to read his blog and learn what goes on in the planet of Mars.