David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Spent a big chunk of last night with Paul, sitting around a bucket of water in the lab cleaning mud off our boots with a toilet brush and talking about how to become a for-real astronaut. Just about everyone here but me has taken serious steps toward becoming an astronaut, and it sounds like it’s even harder than getting a novel published. They have so many applicants and the requirements are so stringent that the tiniest problem — or no probem at all — can knock you out of consideration. In fact, it might just be that the easiest route to becoming an astronaut is to become a US Senator, like John Glenn. That’s a position you can obtain with no qualifications but a substantial bank account.

Internet is back up and running at full speed today, thank goodness. It went down again this morning, and I volunteered to go out and clean the dish, but while I was putting my boots on it came back up by itself. Apparently I have become so mighty an engineer that just the threat of a visit from me is enough to make balky equipment cooperate.

On the flip side of that equation, backpack #4 — the one that wasn’t working when we arrived, and whose battery I replaced — never did charge all the way up and Mission Support recommended I try completely discharging it and charging it for 24 hours. I did so yesterday… and it reacted to this treatment by dying altogether. I was extremely annoyed to be leaving the next crew with a dead pack, after managing to keep all six running for my whole rotation. But after another 12 hours it seems to have mostly recovered: the light is yellow rather than green, and it doesn’t blow air quite as forcefully as the others, but it’s at least usable. Given another 24 hours of charging it might even be all the way up to 100%.

We had more snow overnight. Bianca and Diego went out for an EVA in the snow but Laksen and I were more cautious; we stayed inside and worked on the Engineering Rounds Quick Guide. This completes the series of Quick Guides — the planned Power Systems Quick Guide could not be completed because we haven’t seen DG this week. I also wrote up an email detailing the problems we’ve had with our Internet connection this week, with lessons learned and open questions, and mailed it to Mission Support. I hope future crews will find these documents useful.

With the snow and mud, I’m concerned about the next crew making it up Cow Dung Road (really no more than a trail) from the highway to the hab, but if they get the 4WD vehicle from the rental agency as they are supposed to (we didn’t) they should be okay. It’s been clear and cold all day here, but there are threatening clouds on the horizon and at the moment the wind is blowing so hard we can feel the whole hab shake. Every once in a while there’s a frightening crash as ice comes cascading down from the hab roof.

This week has been a real lesson in You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Till It’s Gone. We had such gorgeous weather for the first week and a half and we didn’t think it would ever change, but since Wednesday it’s been completely different — much harder to work in and much less conducive to beautiful “Marsy” photographs. I’m glad we made good use of it while we had it, and I hope it clears up soon for Crew 89. The same goes for fast and reliable Internet, come to think of it.

We spent the middle of the day cleaning up the hab, the major part of which was sweeping and vacuuming up the dust that has gotten everywhere since the last cleaning. We also organized the tool benches in Engineering and the EVA room, and cleared off the counters in the lab… yesterday those were valuable geological samples, but today they’re just rocks. When Diego asked what he should do with his unneeded samples, I said “Throw ’em out the airlock!” I have never before had the opportunity to say that for real. Bianca even cleaned up the muddy rovers. When we were done the place looked fabulous. Oh, it’s not spotless — this place will never be really clean — but it’s much cleaner than it was, and we think even cleaner than it was when we first arrived.

In the afternoon, we laid various contingency plans to make sure Crew 89 actually makes it out here to relieve us despite the snow and mud. We have a powerful four-wheel-drive vehicle, New Blue (I referred to it as V’ger earlier but V’ger was replaced by this better vehicle), which we can use to drive out to the main road and pick them up if the car they get from the rental agency isn’t up to the task. We also made a large sign saying <– HAB so they won’t miss the turn-off we missed when we came in. We are in email communication with the new crew and we’ll make final plans before they leave the hotel tomorrow morning.

Dinner tonight was a repeat of some of our favorites from earlier in the mission: salad of fresh alfalfa sprouts, corn, and onions with a balsamic vinaigrette, and vegetable couscous. Tomorrow we will treat the newly-arrived Crew 89 with something dehydrated, as is traditional (at least, that’s what Crew 87 did for us, and let me tell you we appreciated it).

I think we’re leaving the hab in excellent shape for the next crew and we eagerly await their arrival tomorrow.

Spent most of the morning on paperwork, one way and another. We have to do an end-of-mission summary report, and most of us spent much of the morning working on our sections of it. It’s really rather amazing what we’ve accomplished in the last almost-two-weeks. We’ve done some serious science, we’ve had some amazing adventures, we’ve become experts at things that we’ll never do again. (Unless we return, of course — there are quite a few people who’ve gone on multiple MDRS rotations — but even if we do return, things will have changed.)

I helped people with wordsmithing and such, and as we were working on the brief personal biographies for each section I was struck once again by what an amazingly qualified crew we have. Laksen has four advanced degrees and is a VP of a major biomedical company; Bianca represented Belgium at International Space Camp; Paul was a semifinalist for the “academic Heisman” award; Diego is well on his way to being an ESA astronaut. I am so honored to have had the opportunity to be part of this crew.

Despite the fact that much of yesterday’s snow is still around, Paul, Laksen, and Bianca took off on a GPS-tagging EVA. The mud was terrible, though, and they soon had to turn back. I prepared hot cocoa for the poor chilled Marsnauts. Paul’s radio came back from the EVA muddy and nonfunctional, but once I scraped the mud out of the little USB port on the bottom it came back to life. (In the process I also discovered tht these radios have a powerful LED flashlight built in. Good to know about in case of emergency.)

In the afternoon it began to rain, making the already horrendous mud even worse. Also, our Internet connection is currently limited again, even though the bandwidth usage report shows that we did not use more than the usual amount of bandwidth yesterday. (I’ve asked the Mars Society to contact HughesNet and find out what’s going on but haven’t heard back yet.) So with horrible weather outside and no Internet to speak of, I pulled out the game Set and taught it to Bianca and Paul. They are both very smart people and caught on immediately — in fact, they both beat me handily.

It’s snowing now. The snow is building up on the satellite dish and at the moment we have no Internet at all, so this report may not go out until tomorrow, but I’m going to try to send it now just in case.

(Later:) Well, that didn’t work. Diego brushed the snow off the dish and that brought the signal back, but it went back down to zero again within 20 minutes. At the moment I’m watching the signal meter wobble between 2 and 4, which is not enough to get a lock on the satellite. So nore more Internet until the weather clears.

The feeling of isolation I am feeling right now is, I think, the most important thing I’ve gotten from this experience. The dust and the mechanical failures and the sound of breath in your space helmet are all part of the Mars experience, but I don’t think that any smaller-scale simulation could have given me this very genuine feeling of complete isolation and self-reliance. We are a long, long way from home and from anyone who could help us, and we are reliant on the materials we have here and our own wits to survive, and even though we are not actually on Mars the situation is similar in emotionally important ways. It’s not just our current situation that makes me feel this way; I’ve felt it the whole time, but right now I’m feeling it very keenly.

This feeling makes me more adventurous, more willing to take risks, and it also makes me more what I call “protagonisty.” Protagonists don’t just sit around or wait or expect other people to do things. They try to better their own situation; they take actions that affect the plot. Making your protagonist more protagonisty is an important way to make a story more engaging; making yourself more protagonisty is an important way to improve your own life.

It was being protagonisty that got me here, and I think the same is true of all the other people here. I’ve been a lot more protagonisty in these two weeks than I usually am — leaping in to fix things, trying things that might have a downside, seeking forgiveness rather than permission. It’s been an important life lesson to me and I hope to hang onto it for at least a while after I get home.

But I am ready to go home now.

I sure hope this weather doesn’t stop crew 89 from getting here on Saturday…

(Later:) Okay, Paul’s going out to try brushing the snow off the satellite dish again…

You know, given enough time you can get used to just about anything. Even though sleeping in the hab is a lot like trying to sleep on a park bench with an idling semi nearby, I’m now getting at least seven solid hours of sleep every night. My hands have gone from being so rough that they catch on my sweater to just being dry. And although I can’t claim that I don’t notice when I’m wearing a space suit, the feelings of claustrophobia and the harsh oppressive sound of my own breathing have vanished from my perceptions completely. The daily engineering tasks have become second nature, and crises that would have dominated our day in the early part of the mission are now taken in stride, with all of us leaping into immediate action so that no serious consequences occur.

Must be almost time to go home.

Even though we’re only in the middle of our second week here, we feel the end of our rotation breathing down our necks. The new crew arrives Saturday, and we need to spend Friday cleaning up and doing our end-of-rotation paperwork, which means that today and tomorrow are our last two days in sim. Fortunately we have completed all of the suit study trials, have collected a bunch of rock samples for the microfossil and extremophile studies, and have finished work on the telescope, so we are in good shape, but there’s still plenty of data analysis to do on those projects and lots of GPS tracking and geotagging yet to do.

And then we woke up and found the ground covered with snow from the front porch to the horizon. We thought Monday was a snow day, but that was really just a heavy frost and it was all gone within hours. This was SNOW — at least a couple of inches of fluffy white stuff. Quite a shock after yesterday’s blue skies and 50-degree temps.

And then the Internet went down! Trapped in a tin can, miles from civilization, and NO INTERNET!? Surely we would be shortly reduced to eating our own shoes! Fortunately, power-cycling the satellite modem a couple of times brought our connectivity back. We learned a few things from that incident that I documented in the Quick Guide.

Even with the Internet back we weren’t sure what to do — the fossil-hunting and GPS-tracking EVAs that we’d planned out last night weren’t going to be possible with everything covered with snow. But Paul pointed out that we really needed to warm up the rovers so they’d be ready for tomorrow.

So we did. We made sure those rovers were good and warmed up. I believe the technical term is “Yee-Ha!”

Laksen and I came in while Paul, Diego, and Bianca were still warming up the rovers; I fixed corned beef hash for lunch while Laksen dealt with his daily engineering tasks. Then the gang came in to the traditional welcome beverage for those who come in from the snow, which is hot cocoa. Except that since this bunch is from Florida, Texas, Colombia, Sri Lanka, and Belgium, none of them knew about this tradition and I (from Wisconsin) had to explain it to them. They enjoyed the hot cocoa, though.

After lunch we saw that the sun had come out and the temperature had climbed to 47 degrees, so Laksen, Bianca, and I decided to try a GPS tracking run — we’d stick to the main road and keep our speed down for safety. At first it was delightful, motoring across the fresh crisp snow, which sparkled in the sun and provided a delightful contrast with the red rocks and blue sky. But as we got further down the road and the temperatures continued to climb, the dirt beneath the snow changed to mud and the going got kind of nasty. We were slipping and sliding all over the place and the rovers’ wheels were kicking up great quantities of brown and red goo; climbing hills turned into a real trial. I got stuck at one point, and Bianca had to take over my rover to get it out, but then I remembered the first lesson of driving in snow — Don’t Stop, Don’t Slow Down — and from then on I was fine. Still, it was pretty unpleasant, and then we couldn’t find the next stretch of trail in the snow, so we decided to bag it and head back to the hab.

When we got back from that and cleaned up as much as possible, I worked on the Quick Guides. I have 9 one-page guides completed (ATVs, radios, webcams, white water system, black water system, gray water system and GreenHab, Internet, communication with the Mars Society, and EVA suit maintenance) and 2 to go (power system and engineering rounds), but I decided to print out and laminate what I’ve got. I also emailed them to a bunch of folks at the Mars Society and I hope they will be helpful for future missions.

Then it was time for dinner. I whomped up a batch of fried rice with tofu, miscellaneous vegetables, and rehydrated egg whites, which wasn’t bad despite the fact that we’re all out of soy sauce. Meanwhile Bianca rehydrated some cauliflower, topped it with Hollandaise sauce and rehydrated cheese, and popped it in the oven. It all came out delicious; just the thing for the end of a snowy day.

We had a busy day planned today, so as soon as we all finished breakfast (oatmeal again for me) we got straight to work. Diego, Laksen, and I took off for the final set of suited trials of the “determination of error in biological sampling due to EVA suit constraints” study. Laksen did his first, then headed back to the hab while I did my two. These weren’t as much of a pain as the first two I did, because I’m more experienced in the suit and in the specific skills needed for this plant-gathering task. Though I did seem to collect my pencil more frequently than I did some of the plants. I took lots of pictures of Laksen’s trial and of Diego looking for extremophiles in the rocks while waiting for Laksen to finish.

Once I was done with my suit trial I headed back to the hab, where I met Laksen and Paul who had just suited up for the final assembly phase of the radiotelescope. With the aid of a drill and a big hammer we got it all done and we posed for celebratory photographs. In the afternoon I wrote up a handoff report for the next crew, who will take over the work where we had to leave off due to lack of the right kind of coaxial cable. (It’s working, and the height is adjustable, but it can’t be raised to the ideal height because the connecting cable’s too short.)

I came in after two and a half hours in my suit to a fine bowl of soup for lunch, and the welcome news that our Internet seemed to be back up to speed. We will monitor our usage closely to be sure the problem does not recur.

After lunch I worked on the radiotelescope handoff report and the Quick Guides for maintenance of the EVA suits and the GreenHab (with Laksen’s help) while Steve, Paul, and Diego went off searching for fossils, with great success. As soon as they got back, Laksen, Bianca, and I hopped on the rovers and went out on another GPS-tracking run, looking for a trail that is called Cactus Road on our map. But the map is three years old and several previous attempts to find it had failed. Perhaps it had washed out. Finally, though, we did manage to find it, and it was a gorgeous run through a spectacular canyon labeled Valles Marineris on the map. (Though I’m told the canyon at Muddy Creek is even more spectacular.) We didn’t make it to the end of the trail, but we’ll try again tomorrow. I’m getting much better at navigating bumpy terrain and stepping over obstacles in first gear, and I’m very grateful to Paul, Laksen, and Bianca for their tolerance and support.

A big wind kicked up today, making the whole hab rattle like rain on the roof, and we can see some clouds that look like heavy weather on the horizon. We made sure to cover the rovers tightly against the weather and take in all equipment from the rover garage. I feel rather proprietary toward faithful Opportunity Girl, my favorite rover, which has served me very well. The rovers, and even the EVA backpacks, have developed individual personalities for me and I will miss them when I return to Earth.

Woke up this morning to snow! A light dusting of snow on the ground and just a bit in the air. Changed the appearance of the place completely — very pretty, though not very Marslike.

The snow threw our plans for the day into a cocked space helmet. The suit constraints study, for example, couldn’t be done because you couldn’t see the plants under the snow. So we brainstormed a bunch of other stuff that could be done, most of it in the hab.

It was at around this time that we noticed our Internet was running exceptionally slowly. We tried restarting the wifi router and the satellite modem, but that didn’t help. We suspected the weather, which was overcast as well as snowy and very cold, but we’ve had overcast before and it hasn’t hurt us like this. We contacted Mission Support — connectivity was present, though very slow — and they suggested that we might have hit our satellite Internet connection’s bandwidth limit. However, even the bandwidth usage page was taking forever to load. Finally I managed to determine that we’d used over 250 MB — more than 5 times our usual hourly usage — between 8 and 9 AM. That might explain why our Internet usage was throttled, but we’d all been at breakfast at that time! We tried and tried to figure out what had been the cause, not to scapegoat anyone but to keep it from happening again. Eventually it seemed that one of us had not managed to completely turn off updates and their computer had perhaps automatically downloaded a large Windows update during that time. That’s turned off now, so with any luck our connection will return to normal speed at midnight tonight and the problem will not recur. I really hope so, because being without reasonable Internet connectivity is a royal pain!

Once we got that issue sorted out — or at least diagnosed — Laksen and Bianca took off on a GPS trail-mapping run and I started work on some more Quick Guides. But what really got us excited was the idea of shooting our official portraits. For a backdrop we set up the Official Flag of Mars (red, green, and blue), a map of Mars, and a plaque about the Mars Society that usually hangs in the airlock, and we prepared to pose in front of it in our space suits (holding the helmet) and in our official crew polo shirts. But then various people wanted to spruce up for their photos, so we kind of lost momentum.

While we were waiting for the photos to happen, Paul and Laksen decided to go off on another GPS trail-mapping run. It looked pretty darn cold out there but they talked me into going along and I had a great time jouncing along on an ATV across barely-tracked rough terrain. In fact, if you’ve ever been to Disneyland, imagine the Indiana Jones ride over the countryside of Big Thunder Mountain Railway. Only rougher and longer. I quickly learned that on an ATV your suspension system is your knees, not your butt, and after a while I was galumphing across ruts and gulleys with hardly a second thought. It was great fun and we saw some fabulous scenery and picked up some fossil shells as well as mapping out the trail system.

We got back just in time for our crew photos, smiling for the camera in our space suits and polo shirts. Bianca takes the school photos for her kids’ school, so she had the whole thing down pat. It was very familiar, but also kind of surreal, and I think the photos came out great. (Paul thinks I look like Michael Farraday in Lost.) School photo day on Mars.

Today is a cooking day, and we got kind of ambitious. Bianca and I prepared pasta, pesto sauce from a mix, and canned spaghetti sauce beefed up with sauteed onions, TVP, and spices. Bianca also made muffins, which came out great, and Diego popped up with alfalfa sprouts from the GreenHab, which we served as a salad with a dressing of balsamic vinegar and rehydrated onions. A meal fit for a king!

We had an excellent conversation over and after dinner, including Star Trek and Monty Python references, but now it’s time for the writing of reports and other paperwork. With the Internet still throttled it’s going to take a while to submit this so I think I’ll stop writing and send it in now.

It’s very hard to believe that we are now more than halfway done with our mission. We arrived at MDRS last Saturday and the next crew will arrive this Saturday. We have been working 18-hour days, so we’re pretty tired, but we’re still excited and we have plenty more to do before we head back to Earth. But the Best Western in Grand Junction is going to feel like the Ritz.

It being Sunday today, we decided not to have our morning briefing at any set time but just to sleep until we woke up. I woke up around 7:30 anyway. We’d turned the heat down last night because it was over 75 degrees F upstairs, but in the morning it was 41 degrees F downstairs. I needed to go to the bathroom, which is downstairs, but I hesitated at the top of the stairs like a cat at the door on a cold day.

Before breakfast I had to go into the EVA prep room to check out something that had been bothering me during the night. We discovered recently that the new radios we just got are much easier to use if you attach them to your suit with a belt clip instead of tucking them in a pocket, but I didn’t know if we had clips for all of them. But after I looked in a few places I found the clips for all six. I also verified that they were all properly turned off and charging — it’s really easy to drop them in the charger in such a way that they don’t actually make contact.

Breakfast was oatmeal with dehydrated mandarin oranges. Over breakfast we talked about how much we wished we’d had some kind of simple, up-to-date one-page checklist and troubleshooting guide for our most important procedures, rather than the detailed and, unfortunately, obsolete manuals we have. I responded to this challenge like a good technical writer and quickly whomped out one-page Quick Guides for the ATVs, radios, and webcams. Quick Guides for the power and water systems will follow as soon as possible.

In the latter part of the morning Laksen, Paul, and I continued setup of the radiotelescope, working mostly in the rover garage. Most of this work consisted of measuring out nylon ropes, tying knots, and drilling holes. We got just about ready to set up the masts when it was time for lunch. I snarfed some ramen noodles (amazingly, Steve didn’t know what they were — I thought every college student in America lived on them) and then headed back out with Paul to continue work, while Laksen and Bianca took off on an EVA to do GPS tracking and photo geotagging of all the trails around the hab. Paul and I got the four masts erected, the guy wires loosely wrapped around the stakes, and the antennas attached to the masts. The adjustable masts are currently at their lowest point, 10′ high, because we don’t have the coaxial cable necessary to reach the antennas at the 20′ height we need to pick up radio signals from Jupiter at this point in its year, but at least we could check out the antennas and make sure they work. And they do! We picked up a signal that seems to be varying with the time of day as the sun’s signal would be expected to do. It sounds like static, but it’s the music of the spheres.

We’d planned a fossil-hunting EVA in the late afternoon, but the geotagging EVA got back later than scheduled and we didn’t think there would be time to reach the fossil bed and return before dark. I was disappointed, but then Paul and Laksen invited me along on a second GPS run, looking for a trail the first run had failed to find. We did manage to find and tag the trail, and I had a fun time on the ATVs and saw some spectacular scenery. Thanks guys!

Dinner tonight will be Kung Fu Chicken, the first dehydrated meal we had and still the tastiest we’ve tried. We’ve all worked up a good appetite today and we’re really looking forward to it.

Oatmeal for breakfast today, immediately after which I suited up and headed out with Diego for his study on “Determination of error in biological sampling due to EVA suit constraints.” Each trial in this study consists of one test subject spending 20 minutes going over a patch of desert and identifying, photographing, counting, and taking samples of each different type of plant found there, either in a space suit (experiment) or not (control). There are 5 patches of desert and each of us is doing all of them, randomly selected as to whether each is suited or non-suited. The luck of the draw was that I was scheduled for one non-suited trial and four suited.

I did the non-suited trial at the beginning of the mission, and today I did two of my four suited trials. Man, what a pain! The gloves are the worst part. Imagine taking a photograph, writing down a brief description, breaking off a bit of plant, and stuffing it in one of several plastic bags, all wearing heavy winter gloves. (You are also juggling the camera, clipboard, and plastic bags in your hands, which is not the way I think a real biological survey would work, but that’s neither here nor there because we did it the same way in both trials.) The helmet makes it hard to see, the backpack makes it hard to balance, and all in all it’s painstaking, tedious, hard work — stoop labor on Mars. The worst part is when Diego throws all the samples away at the end of each trial (we aren’t measuring accuracy, only number of samples collected). And I have two more suited trials to do. I can really see why the astronauts in The Right Stuff despised the scientists so much.

Right after I got back from that, I joined Paul and Laksen in the lab to work on the radiotelescope. We think we’ve thrashed out a workable design for an adjustable support structure that can be constructed using the materials at hand, and when we finished work yesterday we made sure all the relevant bits were taken inside so we could do as much as possible in the lab. We got the cables measured and cut, and later today we plan to drill the holes and tie knots so that we can do an EVA tomorrow morning and just set the thing up. Wish us luck.

Lunch was canned corned beef, which looked disgusting to me, but Bianca sauteed onions and added tomato powder and spices and served it over mashed potatoes and it was pretty good.

In the afternoon I was still kind of beat from the suit study in the morning and I decided to not participate in any EVAs and take care of some other business. I backed up my computer, rearranged my Monster Bag (there’s no place to unpack it, so I’ve just been digging in it for everything I need and it’s all gotten horribly jumbled up), vaccumed the lab (just to beat back the encroaching dust a bit), and took a nap. But when I saw the cool photos and videos everyone brought back I regretted not having done another EVA today.

While everyone else was returning from their EVAs, I cooked dinner. Usually at home I work from recipes, but Bianca’s an improviser and after consulting with her I whomped up something I’d call Tofu Enchilada Style: sauteed dehydrated onions, tofu, a package of enchilada seasoning, canned spaghetti sauce, and dehydrated cheese served over a mix of white and brown rice. It was darn tasty, actually, but the real hit of the meal was the muffins Bianca made.

Our daily reports at http://desert.marssociety.org/mdrs/fs09/ are supposed to include photos, but they take 24 hours to be posted when it’s working and it hasn’t been working lately. In fact, we only have photos posted for 1/11 and 1/13, plus two (of the seven we submitted) for 1/14. We’ve been going back and forth with Mission Support on this, but the webmaster’s on vacation and nobody else has the necessary passwords to address the situation. Frustrating. (I’ve been posting photos on my personal blog but they’re not the same ones.)

Today started with the now-usual ATV warm-up run. We had gorgeous weather again today, despite the fact that snow was in the forecast — for some reason the weather we’ve been having has been much drier and warmer than forecast for Hanksville, just three miles away. (Mind you, it was 14 degrees F when I got up. Brr!) Because the weather was nice and the trip back from Engineering is so scenic, I stuck my camera in my front pocket with the lens sticking out and took a short Rover-Cam video. It’s not quite level but otherwise turned out quite well. Like the other videos I’ve mentioned, I’ll upload it to YouTube after I return to Earth.

After our morning briefing I tackled the EVA room webcam, which has been down since before we got here. The camera itself is in a difficult location to reach, at the end of three USB cables. I checked all the connections, unplugged and replugged it, rebooted the system — nothing. So, suspecting that perhaps one of the cables had been gnawed by Martian mice, I un-duct-taped the camera from the wall and plugged it directly into the computer. This resulted in all sorts of uninformative Windows errors and also knocked the printer offline. I tried all the USB troubleshooting steps I could think of — no dice (though I did get the printer back up and running). Finally I gave up and decided to put the camera back where it had been, just so it wouldn’t get lost among all the other bits of miscellaneous computer hardware here. But when I plugged it back into the third extension cable, I heard a little bing-bong from the computer. I looked… and it was online! I have no idea what I did but I’m not going to mess with success. I taped it back up and, with Bianca’s help, got it pointed at what I hope is an interesting part of the EVA room. (Bianca and I are both on the short side, so if you see the taller Marsnauts walking around with their heads cut off that’s why.) So we now have six working webcams, up from three when I arrived.

Once I got done with that I helped Laksen pump water around. We have to haul out an electrical pump to move our clean water from the trailer in which it is delivered into the external tank next to the hab, and then run a separate pump to get it from the external tank to the internal tank in the loft. We also have a third pump to move gray water from the underground tank in which it is collected into the greenhab, where it is filtered and processed by duckweed and water hyacinths until it is clean enough to use for flushing the toilet, as mentioned earlier. The gray water is then moved from the greenhab to the toilet via a hand pump, which takes quite a bit of effort, whenever you want to flush. This is one reason we say “if it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down.” We also fired up the heater that keeps the pipes under the bathroom from freezing. Maintaining human life is all about water — too much water, or water in the wrong place, can be as much of a problem as too little, even on Mars.

After a nice lunch of rehydrated noodles with vegetables, courtesy of Bianca, I sat down with Laksen and Paul to continue work on the radiotelescope. We spent about half the afternoon designing the guy wires that will keep the telescope’s masts vertical and properly positioned; this involved a lot of basic trigonometry and quite a bit of figuring out what we have in terms of hardware, rope, and cable. This took enough time that we did not get out on the surface today for this project.

In the late afternoon I went out on a geological EVA with Steve and Bianca, looking for microfossils. As I had no idea what to look for, and wasn’t brave enough to climb up as high as Steve, I just picked up interesting-looking rocks and took photos. The light was excellent and the photos came out very Marsy. I took some videos too.

Most MDRS missions have only one engineer. We have three, in effect — Laksen is the official engineer, and Paul and I are both handy with tools and available to help. For myself, I’ve been spending a lot of time on engineering tasks because I don’t have a scientific mission and because I enjoy solving problems. It’s great for me because anything I can do in this area is a bonus — nothing was expected of me coming in. I understand that life on the International Space Station is similar: broken equipment and daily maintenance can easily take over the whole day. But with the three of us working on maintenance and repairs, we can actually get ahead of the game and leave the hab in better shape than when we came. This is very satisfying to me.

Today started out much like yesterday, with a quick trip out to Engineering to warm up and gas up the ATVs. The weather was gorgeous, clear and crisp but not too cold, and even on that short ride I was struck anew by the sere beauty of this alien place. If it’s nice again tomorrow I’ll try to take a video.

After breakfast and morning briefing, Paul, Laksen, and I put our heads together over the bits of the radiotelescope in the science lab. As in the movie Apollo 13, our challenge is to make this fit into that using only this stuff. In our case the available stuff is a little more than they had in the Apollo capsule but it’s still weirdly limited. The radiotelescope consists of four twenty-foot masts holding up two dipole antennas, and they have to be braced with guy wires, but we don’t have wire, just rope (and it’s several different varieties of rope scavenged from various other projects); we don’t have turnbuckles or eye bolts; and we don’t have all the tools we’d like, but we do have an entire large plastic container full of various kinds of adhesive tape. It’s like trying to do a home remodeling project at your beach house, if your beach house were too far from the nearest town to buy anything you left at home.

Another thing we did this morning is that we decided the hab was getting pretty scruffy, so we buckled down for a couple hours of cleaning. If you saw on the webcam that Bianca, the only woman, was mopping the floor on the residential level, please be reassured that the guys were sweeping and vacuuming like mad in the lab and the EVA room (where the webcam is still out of order — sorry, I’ll look into that soon, I hope). We also took out all the garbage and discards, scrubbed the toilet, and swept out the airlocks. The place looks much, much better now and we’ve instituted a strict shoe policy (no outside or downstairs shoes upstairs) to keep the dust from getting into the residential areas. It’s a bit like being Japanese.

After a really thorough cleaning we were ready for a good hot lunch. As it is a “cooking” day, we could fix whatever we wanted… though, again, it’s a matter of making this fit into that using only this stuff. We have nothing fresh, very little meat and very little that isn’t dehydrated. We wound up with a very nice creamy wild rice soup, chili, and mashed potatoes with cheese. Hot and filling.

Most of my afternoon was spent in a space suit, just outside the hab, setting up the radiotelescope. We started by driving lengths of pipe into the ground to act as bases for the masts, using what I call The First Tool: a big rock. Then we drilled holes into the masts in some places and attached pipe clamps in others so that we had somewhere to attach the guy ropes, measured and cut the guy ropes, and erected one mast. But as soon as we got it up we realized the antenna’s coaxial cable is not long enough to reach the antenna at its new height. We took measurements, took the mast back down, and called it a day; an unknown number of days of work remain, but we are optimistic that we can finish it before the end of this rotation. If there’s more coaxial cable in the hab somewhere.

I was pretty wiped out after that and I declined to join in the afternoon’s geological EVA. While they were gone I recorded a brief video tour of the hab, which is something I’ve been meaning to do for some time, and caught up on some paperwork. Steve, Bianca, and Laksen came back with some great pictures, lots of geological samples, and the story of having run into a couple of local tourists who were just pleased as punch to get their pictures taken shaking hands with a real live Martian. Steve’s microfossil search achieved success: he found a fossil ostracod! Diego also found life this afternoon, specificially endoliths (cryptoendolithic algae) in some minerals he collected this morning.

Then came the time of staring into the cupboard and wondering what to fix for dinner. We found a box of couscous and Bianca got the brainstorm to prepare a vegetable couscous. We rehydrated onions and sauteed them, added broccoli, corn, peas, and carrots rehydrated in water with a couple boullion cubes, and topped it off with half a can of tomato paste and a variety of spices. Served over couscous cooked in the water we drained off the vegetables after rehydration, it was really really good. We also had “blueberry” muffins that Paul fixed from a Jiffy boxed mix. Best dinner yet, and great conversation over it as well.

Unfortunately that dinner took rather a lot of time to prepare, so I didn’t get around to writing my report until quite late. I have to submit this in the next five minutes or Mission Support will be unhappy with me, so off it goes!

The plan for today was to split up into teams morning and afternoon. In the morning, Diego and Bianca would perform the first experimental (suited) trials of the ergonomics study while Paul, Laksen, and I did a preliminary survey of the radiotelescope from the pressurized tunnel (i.e. path to the greenhouse). Then after lunch, Steve and Bianca would go off looking for microfossils while Paul, Laksen, and I began actual work on the radiotelescope.

What actually happened was that after Paul, Laksen, and I filled up the ATVs’ tanks and checked their oil and tires, we went to pump water from the trailer in which it is delivered into the hab’s external tank and the pump wouldn’t run. It had been fine yesterday…. I tried unkinking the hose and poking at it in various ways, up to and including a complete disassembly, but still it would only hum when plugged in. At one point when we had it disassembled it began to spin, and we cheered and put it back together. Naturally once it was back together it wouldn’t work any more. Fortunately we have enough water in the tank for several days so this isn’t an immediate crisis, and right after lunch the water pump began working again, apparently all by itself. We went out and filled the tank right away, as long as it was working. (I still don’t trust it long-term).

While I was working on the pump, Laksen looked for the source of water we’d seen leaking out from under the hab. It turned out that the U-bend under the sink in the science lab had come loose — someone in some previous crew had put a bucket under it, but we’d been using it unawares and it had filled up and spilled over. There was ice at the back of the cabinet and water on the floor as well. Laksen started to look for PVC pipe cement to reattach it but I thought I remembered that gluing a U-bend in place would be bad — you need to be able to get it off to clean out the trap — and that it should be possible to just finger-tighten the joint. Turned out the gasket in the joint was in backwards, and once reversed and finger-tightened it no longer leaked (well, maybe seeped a little). We did manage to get about a half-hour in on the radiotelescope, reading over the documentation and surveying the current state of construction.

While lunch was cooking, I also ran up to the Musk Observatory to see if I could fix the #1 webcam there, which was completely washed out even when the sun wasn’t shining directly into its eye. Poking around at the computer there, I stumbled into a deeply-buried settings screen where all the contrast, brightness, and gamma controls were seriously messed up. A simple press on the Restore Defaults button brought the camera back to life. Go me! There were three working webcams when we arrived and now we have five. I’ll tackle the sixth when I get a chance.

For lunch we had split-pea soup from a mix, with dehydrated peas and corn and some yummy yummy TVP added. It was actually pretty tasty. We Marsnauts are research subjects in a food study, where we alternate cooking and non-cooking days and fill out a survey each day about how we liked them and what our current mood and energy level is, and today is a non-cooking day. On non-cooking days we eat only rehydrated foods (the sort of thing you would find at a camping or survivalist store); tonight’s dinner is Texas BBQ Chicken with Beans. Some of these dehydrated meals are really good. (They’re also expensive.) On cooking days we can cook whatever we like from what is available — which is, more often than not, something else pre-prepared. One night I got ambitious and made a stir-fry of tofu, rehydrated broccoli, and rehydrated onions, served over real rice. It was pretty good, in my opinion, but I don’t think it was good enough to justify the time it took.

Our time is fully occupied here. The days are filled with EVAs and various maintenance and repair tasks, and the evenings are largely taken up with the daily reports we have to file with the Mars Society, planning the next day’s activities, and blogging. Blogging is a serious activity here — it’s public outreach. Diego and I had blogs before being selected for this mission. Laksen started blogging after he was selected, and Paul and Bianca both started blogging after they arrived here. Only Steve is blog-resistant.

After lunch we suited up for our radiotelescope EVA. The radiotelescope we have here is a very simple one based on designs provided by NASA’s Radio Jove project (http://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/). It just consists of a pair of dipole antennas — basically two parallel wires — which can receive a signal from a powerful radio source such as Jupiter or the Sun. The height of the two wires above the ground determines the angle in the sky where the antenna is focused, and right now that height is fixed to the position of Jupiter when the telescope was first constructed (it’s since moved). We’re replacing the poles that hold up the wires with telescoping assemblies so the telescope can be “pointed” at different parts of the sky. Two of the poles were replaced by the previous crew and we’re going to try to finish the job. Today we managed to get the two fixed-height poles taken down and all the necessary parts moved into the lab; the next step is to build the telescoping poles.

Almost immediately after that EVA Paul and Laksen decided to go out on one more EVA to check out some repairs we’d made to the suits. I was tired, but when Paul invited me along I said “I’m never going to have this opportunity again” and I suited up with them. We’re getting pretty good at the suiting process and it went quickly; we then took ATVs a short way away and climbed up a mesa. It was cool to be walking across the stripes you can see from the hab, and the whole thing felt exceptionally Marsy. The view was spectacular, but I pooped out before reaching the summit, alas. I rested on a rock while Laksen and Paul climbed to the top and got some great pictures.

After everyone got back from their various EVAs we sat down at our computers to prepare our daily reports and began boiling water for dinner. So ends another day on Mars.