Commander Report
25/02/2013
Melissa Battler
Today was our first official day of Mars simulation. We started the day by greeting the sun – which we hadn’t seen much of in a few days! – with some morning yoga. The rest of the morning was spent collecting crew data for Ayako’s human factors experiment. After lunch, Csilla, Hans and I went on an EVA to the inverted channel ~1.5 km south of MDRS. We walked to northern part of the channel deposit, and it took approximately 30 min each way. We had a few issues with the radio ear pieces, and a bit of discomfort with the suits, but otherwise the EVA went well. The long amount of time spent walking meant that we didn't have sufficient time to complete our science goals, so Csilla, Volker, and Ayako will return to the site tomorrow. We are a bit concerned, however, because of our large number of scientific studies, and our very ambitious EVA schedule for the remaining duration of our mission. We'll do our best to prioritize and hopefully collect sufficient data for at least a few publications. We hope to publish at least 5 papers with the data we will collect! In addition, today Matt acted as Hab Comm while we were out on EVA, and communications between Matt and the EVA crew went flawlessly. Tonight we enjoyed a delicious dinner and fresh bread thanks to Volker and Matt, and we'll spend the rest of our evening after the mission support comms window finalizing our (tentative!) schedule for the week.