Mission: January 23 to February 6, 2010
There have been several articles and posts written about our mission already. Here’s a roundup for your viewing pleasure:
Amnon Govrin wrote about his February 5 visit to us at MDRS, providing an articulate and interesting view from the outside, complete with pictures:
A Short Visit to (Analog) Mars
The State News did an excellent article [...]
Our last day at MDRS dawned rather solemnly, with everyone up by 8, packing and tidying, but feeling a bit at loose ends. Would we have our regular morning meeting? Or had our routine already evaporated? Eventually we all did sit down for breakfast together, which felt comfortingly normal, and then we [...]
The 89th expedition to the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) returned to Earth today having successfully completed a two-week mission in a Mars analog environment.
Today our crew was interviewed by Amnon Govrin, a space enthusiast blogger. He brought his twin 9-year-old sons, and we had a good time showing all three of them around our Hab, GreenHab, Musk Observatory, and Engineering Station. Amnon came equipped with a sharp camera and a list of questions for us. [...]
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Brian showed me how the software worked so that I could help him prepare it for shot data collection. We had to update the current position each time Luis moved, and update the position of the land streamer each time we advanced it. It was good to have two people who could operate [...]
I spent half of today up on Radio Ridge assisting with Brian’s seismic survey. He’d gone out yesterday with Luis and Darrel to start the survey, but they’d had their EVA truncated when the Panasonic Toughbook they were using fell off the ATV and yanked the Ethernet port entirely out of the PCMCIA card, [...]
After abdicating some tantalizing EVAs for the past three days on account of my not feeling well, I was looking forward to getting outside today and finally starting my seismic research project. I had originally planned to do the first seismic EVA yesterday, but I just wasn’t ready, so Kiri led the geology section [...]
Living far away from friends and family on another planet, isolated from all the comforts of home, dealing with easily handled problems on Earth in a Martian environment can all be frustrating and draining on one’s energy level.
One of the ways to uplift spirits, besides a good game of Guesstures, is cooking or baking [...]
Today during our morning planning meeting, we discussed what our remaining goals for the mission would be. Our first week was a constant barrage of learning new procedures (for science investigations adapted to this environment; for keeping ourselves fed, watered, and clean; and for keeping the Hab functioning). Now that we’ve found our [...]
With only a half-dozen EVAs under my belt, and going no further north than Olympus Mons in any of them, I was eager to get on either the biology or geology/geophysics teams for one of their extended EVAs. As crew astronomer, my contributions to the Hab are basically done: the radio telescope alterations have been [...]