Commander's Report
02/10/2013
Written by Kent Nebergall
Weather was clear and cool with a storm threatening on the horizon that never materialized. I wrote up the mission summary and ran it past the crew for revision prior to sending it this morning. The crew is in good spirits and we are getting our crew management and small-team skills into full gear. Pre-sim training and geology orientation is also proceeding well.
We walked through any issues that had materialized so far, and did an inspection of the hab for any obvious comfort issues within our control. We set up a small electric cool-touch heater in the PVA facility. This will only be used at night and only when occupied, at least for tonight. We had our first sprouts and greens from the garden.
Audrey and Ase are completing the skill transfer for the Engineer role. Tristan is currently inventorying the medicine cabinet. We also assessed the status of the ATVs and began basic training. All ATVs except Number 2 are running to some degree. Dennis will be filing a report on that tonight.
The engineers informed me this evening that the fuel tank for the generator was at 10 percent yesterday and is now 1 percent. I placed a call to DG and reached Celeste, who passed the message onto him at 6:54 earlier this evening.
For pre-sim training, we covered ATV driving out of sim. This was challenging with four different functional ATVs, as only two have the same control layout. Training time was kept minimal to allow more users to practice driving more types of ATV. We will not use ATVs for in-sim EVAs for a few days to allow fueling and maintenance issues to be settled. The crew also did a walking non-sim exercise to get oriented to the local geology and navigation prior to being in sim.
After returning, we suited up all but the two recent MDRS vets to get them used to the suits. It was dark so we did not go outside. We will cover radio work and sim rules concerning the airlock after reports are filed.
The plan for tomorrow is to start on our mission goals that cannot be done easily in sim, then ease into sim. We will start with Audrey’s professional-versus-amateur geologist study and do an out-of-sim expedition to the first two locations on the EuroMoonMars list of eight sites for detailed geology and communications training. The first location is a 15 minute walk from the hab. In the afternoon, we will do a second, in sim walking EVA to the same location if time and weather allow.
The forecast is for 1 inch of snow possibly tonight. If this occurs, we will cover all in house inventory and cleaning tasks, and do lab analysis of several rocks collected in the orientation EVA.