Commander Report
01/20/2013
Angelo Vermeulen
Today was a low activity day for the entire crew. No EVAs were
planned, HI-SEAS related research
was brought back to a minimum, and people were allowed to sleep in and
have breakfast when they
wanted. This proved very beneficial for crew morale. Spontaneously
lots of storytelling happened,
leading to a podcast listening session. Kate Greene shared a Radiolab
podcast in which astronaut
Dave Wolf tells the story of his 1997 near-disastrous EVA.
Everybody expressed the need for a Sunday break simply to halt the
breakneck work pace and
‘recharge batteries’. In the evening Oleg Abramov shared a slide show
about his former MDRS
rotation exactly 10 years ago. And afterwards we played NASA’s ‘Mars
Rover Landing’ game on the
Xbox and Kinect.
D.G. Luska dropped by for a resupply of the diesel fuel for the
generator. He also unpacked and
installed the new backup generator. Engineer Simon Engler went over to
the generator shed together
with Oleg Abramov and myself for an introduction into the
technicalities of the generators. We
temporarily had to break sim for that.
Most crew members used the day to catch up with personal research
projects. Yajaira Sierra Sastre
continued her microbiology research in the lab. More GreenHab work was
done by myself, expanding
plant cultivation, and also placing herb cuttings inside the hab. Oleg
Abramov worked on detailed
3D EVA maps. Kate Greene familiarized herself with the WinSCAT
cognitive tests and facilitated
other crew members' familiarization with the test. She also
investigated the issue of skin
irritation with a crew member who used the ZEO headband for sleep monitoring.