Journalist Report
03/26/2013
Benoît Hespel
The adventure goes on
We are all students, so we are used to live in community like that. However, yesterday evening the
first social strains between crewmembers occurred. It is normal that such issues happened in such a
close space. How did it come? During the day we like to laugh and make some jokes to each other but
in the end it can become a bit annoying for certain people and that was how it came. Fortunately
after a few minutes, everything went better.
At approximately 11 p.m. the astronomer and I went to the observatory for our second night of the
mission. Our objective was to do better than the day before. This time we were warmly dressed up, we
put our suit too but without the oxygen helmet and the rucksack because otherwise it would be
impossible for us to enter the observatory. We were then ready for three hours of observation.
After having made the alignment of the telescope we were able to observe some interesting stars :
Castor, Arcturus and Mizar. We were also very happy to be able to take a look at Saturn and its
major satellite Titan. If we have had the PC with the imaging programs we already could have taken
beautiful pictures. At 2.30 a.m. we stopped the observations and we decided to go sleeping to be as
fit as a fiddle
tomorrow.
The morning was very similar with the previous one. The first four crewmembers got up at 8.00 a.m.
while the two others one hour and a half later. If previously we made some sport in the morning,
this was not the case today. No problem I do it by myself. I think that the crew is already a bit
lazy … But it is true that one of our principal desires is just to have breakfast because we are all
a bit hungry.
The same group as yesterday (geologist and health officer) went out for taking some measurements of
the streambed they had delimited. They found it again quite easily. To reconstruct the flow of the
past river they need to know the depth, the width and the slope of the streambed. Because it is
about 700 meters long they decided to take these measurements at ten or so equidistant points. The
only problem they had was with communication with the station. Indeed because the streambed is
logically located behind a hill, the emitted radiofrequencies waves have some difficulties to arrive
to the receptor. As expected their expedition lasted two hours, so no one died today.
During this period the two engineers in the station worked with their chips. Today they managed to
send small messages with their chips and they studied how to improve the transmission signal by
modifying the inclination of their antennas. It was realized that when they are aligned the
transmission was better. I went with François again to the observatory but it was the first time we
do it while sun was shining. We needed to verify that there wasn’t any more dust on the glass of the
upper part of the telescope. Then we came home to write our respective reports.
For dinner it is very easy to guess what we ate … Soup with rice of course! It’s the third day now.
The problem is not that we don’t like that, except me maybe, but that we began to be fed up with
that sort of food. Our organisms did too I think because some of us had digestive troubles in the
afternoon … That’s the reason why we had to postpone the second outgoing of the day.
While the engineers were outside working with their chips around the station, the geologist and his
colleague were making the mapping of this region and calculating the flow of their streambed thanks
to their earlier measurements. In fact the engineers were again analyzing the power of the
transmission as a function of the distance because the data collected the day before was a bit
weird. Today they got good results.
The end of the day is approaching. This evening we really want to eat a bit of meat. As a carnivore
I acknowledge that I really miss it, like some of the other crewmembers. We don’t know yet how tasty
it will be but we are impatient to discover it.
After this comforting meal the astronomer and I will head to the observatory for a third observation
night, full of stars we hope …
Thoughts from Mars