Mars group > Line on Mars

March 7, 2010. By Line Drube

First full day in the Hab.

I was the only one who slept decently, as the 3 French Air Force cadets and Jon from Australia all suffered from jet-lag and woke up during the night, and Katy from Johnson Space Center had to get used to the new place, but the mood was still very enthusiastic in the morning. It had rained during the night, so everything outside was muddy and it looked very slippery, so we decided to postpone learning how to drive the ATVs. It was actually nice to have a more relaxing day to get settled in the Hab.

The first thing we noticed was however that the water pump didn't work when we tried to fill the inside water tank. The engineers (the cadets) got to work to find the problem, and after checking many things it was discovered that rain must have gotten into the electrical system during the night, and by changing the electrical outlet for the water pump they could get it to work again. The fact that we have webcams aimed at us takes some getting used to, and most of us have gotten e-mails from friends and family who have been looking at us at some point today. It is a weird feeling, and I feel like I'd volunteered for Big Brother, but it helps that there is no sound and that the picture only gets taken every 3 minutes. But we will probably forget the webcams more with time. 

Later in the day the mud had dried somewhat, and I went through the "air tunnels"; to the arctic pile (the pile of stuff other missions didn't need but didn't want to throw out).

It is a great idea to have, and if you have a bit of imagination you can make tons of things.

I went through it and quickly found things I could use to make a platform for my experiment, where it can be kept out of the rains. I put it together and placed it in an open area, to test if the wind and rain would ruin the setup. If it doesn't the next couple of days, then I will put my experiment out. 

When I got back we made our first EVA. We all got into the astronauts suit through much laughter, and we went on an hour long walk in the area to familiarize us with the equipment. It was great to explore the area and look at all the stones and dinosaur bones in the hills.

March 16, 2010. By Line Drube

This was the best day for me in many months.

After breakfast a French pilot cadet Nicholas and I took the ATVs out to scout out the road's muddiness and to also see the much-talked-about viewpoint, Family Crest, over the Muddy Creek. We were only suppose to use 10 minutes there, but when we arrived, we discovered that it would be the same as going to Grand Canyon and only have 10 minutes to see it; so that did not happen.

But it was not enough time, and I could easily see myself using a week just camping in the area. It had much "wow factor" with vertical cliff faces on the canyon walls, and view as far as the eye could see.

There was a very wide river plane (around 1 km or half a mile) with the small Muddy Creek in the middle and with the beautiful canyon walls on the side, and plenty of fascinating side canyons. It is my opinion that this is a must-see for all Mars Desert Reseach Station crews. The extraordinary of what we had seen combined with the exhilaration of riding an ATV, had me on a natural high for hours afterwards, and I still have the silly smile creeping up on me, every time I sit still for a few seconds. That was really something. 

The other crew members used the day testing out Carol Stoker's NASA Ames ground penetrating radar and drilling a ground core with a backpack drill. The day ended with the police knocking on the Hab door!

Somehow something on the Hab had been radio transmitting at very intermittent interval on the emergency line for the State Highway Patrol for the last three months, and they had finally today figured out by double shift of the signal that it was coming from this direction, and since there aren't much out here other than beautiful landscapes and us, we couldn't push the blame onwards.

It was figured out that it might have been an amplifier box for a VHF radio that had just been turned on even though there hadn't been a VHF radio for a long time, but it seems that sometimes something can make it transmit anyway, maybe rain. No matter what we turned it off, and hope we will get no more complaints from the police, who by the way, said they had the same type of stairs as us at the state prison. So, we might even feel at home there.