Commander Report
02/26/2013
Melissa Battler
We had another great day "on Mars" today. I realized this morning that this is the 10 year
anniversary of my first MDRS mission (Crew 14/Expedition One with Rocky Persaud, Shannon Rupert, Jon
Clarke, and many others!), and that today specifically is the 100th day I've spent "on Mars" at
MDRS! Combined with the 101 days my crew and I spent at FMARS in 2007, that means I've lived on
analogue Mars for more than 200 days. Hard to believe! No wonder this place feels like home :)
This morning we completed another round of blood pressure measurements for Ayako's human factors
study, and I gave the crew a brief overview of the MSL mission and the geology of Gale Crater on
Mars, where the rover Curiosity is currently studying landforms very similar to those at MDRS. We
started to look at high resolution satellite imagery of Gale Crater in comparison to high resolution
satellite imagery Hans has obtained for the area surrounding MDRS. Csilla's ArcGIS skills allowed us
to "fly around" a 3-D model of Gale Crater, and observe landforms at different scales and
resolutions. We're looking forward to spending more time with the data, and selecting areas around
MDRS which look especially similar to Gale, so that we can visit these sites and do some ground
truthing.Â
This afternoon Volker, Ayako, and Csilla went on an EVA further south from yesterday's location, and
Csilla continued her study of concretions exposed in and below the inverted channel deposit. She
will elaborate on this in her science report tonight. There was one minor issue with a radio
malfunction at the beginning of the EVA, but after that everything ran smoothly, and the EVA team
returned very happy with their results. This evening we've decided to watch an episode of Battlestar
Galactica to celebrate my 100th day at MDRS.