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I wanted to say with the completion of tonight's commanding this concludes operations former one spacecraft ID 253 and on behalf of the entire mer project we'd like to thank the DSN for over 15 and a half years of outstanding support from launch until tonight that support has made is one of the reasons why this mission has been so successful and once again the DSN has helped us to make history thank you and the station for today on behalf of the network thank you for your comments and thanks for all of us 14 you are released and poor thank re mer project Austin this is a celebration of so many achievements and I'll just start by saying you know when this little rover landed the objective was to have it be able to move 1,100 yards and survive for 90 days on Mars 90 Souls and instead here we are 14 years later after 28 miles of travel and today we get to celebrate the end of this mission so it's it's an honor for me as the NASA Administrator to come out here to this amazing facility with so many amazingly talented people to say thank you for your great work not just for our country but for the science that people are going to be benefitting all over the world they're gonna be benefiting from this science for years to come and so now I'd like to take the opportunity to introduce the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mike Watkins thank you Jim spirit an opportunity may be gone but they leave us a legacy and that's a legacy of a new paradigm for solar system exploration a robotic geologist on Mars and an integrated science and engineering operations team all set out together on a mission of discovery they didn't know what they would find they didn't know which direction they would go sometimes from one day to the next and they made it work and they made it work longer than any of us thought possible by both brilliant scientific deduction of where to go and brilliant engineering to keep the Rovers alive