Mars Desert Research Station Crew 127 Files Final Report
April 05, 2013
For further information about the Mars Society, visit our website at www.marssociety.org
The following is the final report of MDRS Crew 127, which just completed its tour. A full review of this year's activity at the Mars Desert Research Station will be given at the 16th International Mars Society Convention, which will be held August 15-18, 2013 at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Registration for the conference is now open at www.marssociety.org
This report will end our 14 days of simulation at the MDRS. We came here in order to live this wonderful experience on "analog Mars" and will soon return home while having learnt a lot.
First, it was a good life experience as we had to stay in close proximity for 15 days with six people. We had to add to these conditions the isolation and limited comfort. We learned a lot about social behaviour and the modifications it underwent during our stay here. As we usually live in abundance, we are not used to privation or lack of resources. The management of our supplies was a key element in our everyday routine as it could be a reason for conflicts to arise if the distribution was not considered equal.
Among the stress put on us were the water, food and internet consumption. Indeed, water is a really precious resource on (analog) Mars and we needed to spare it as much as possible. We were always really conscious of this matter and managed to use a limited amount of water by changing our usual way of life. The same went with the food, we ate enough to stay healthy but with no excess of any kind. The adaptation to the different kind of food was quite a challenge at some times but there again: we survived! The last resource we are not used to spare was the internet, we had really limited bandwidth and sometimes connection problems arose. We dealt with them and changed our habits of using the net as if it was free and unlimited.
Our simulation days went along a general schedule dividing our crew of six members in three teams of two: the geologist team, the engineer team and the astronomer team. The first one went on EVA nearly every morning to collect data in their survey area while the engineers were perfecting their calibration and preparing their afternoon experiments. As the astronomers had to stay up until early morning, they woke up later and caught up with the rest of the crew before noon. In the afternoon, the geologists and astronomers were analyzing and processing the data and pictures collected previously while the engineers were outside the Hab.
Our initial project number was five but those were designed in Belgium and at that time we had little idea about the life in the Hab and EVA procedures so we had to adapt our projects to the conditions encountered and unexpected problems when we arrived at the station.
Our first project made use of the MUSK observatory as the astronomers’ team used every opportunity to shoot as many photo’s as they could, taking a lot of great pictures. Their start was a little delayed because of material problems: they were missing the laptop needed to operate the CCD camera. It took a few days but they took this time back by working harder during the rest of the simulation. One of their main achievements was a great shot of the Pan-starrs comet.
The same team had another project: the evolution of our odour perception after passing some time in an arid environment. They proceeded to three testing sessions. The first one occurred on the first day after our arrival at the MDRS and was more a trial than a real testing. The objective was to put every crew member on the same level by telling them what flavour they had smelt. After one week of full simulation we took two people for the first real test. This showed that they had improved their score. The most obvious reason is that they remembered the smell from the first time. Finally at the end of our rotation we made the second test with all crew members. A short analysis of the results tends to prove that drought and dust in the Hab has not reduced our sense of smell since scores were very similar.
Among our other projects was a positioning project using a few Xbee antennas and programmable Arduino Fio chips. The first aim was to analyze the strength of the signal and compute the distance between the chips to estimate the position of a crew member. However, after several measurements we found out that the signal strength wasn't accurate at all. We had to adapt the project and made a "localization chip" which was connected to a speaker and three lights. The speaker plays a different tone and switches on one of the lights depending on the distance to the closest chip. Many uses could be designed especially for safety purposes. E.g. every crew member could carry an emitting chip and if one of them is in danger and can't tell the other about his position (he passed out for instance), the other members could easily find him with the localization chip.
The geologists’ team was supposed to proceed to two different projects during the rotation but the time needed for the data collecting in situ took a lot more than expected because of the distance to the survey area and the limited mobility of the EVA suits. As we could not spend too much time on EVA because of other duties or the need for other crew members to go outside, we didn’t had sufficient time to conduct both projects at the same time. On the other hand, the first project was showing promising results so they chose to dedicate all their time to one good project instead of two unfinished ones. The study of climatic conditions by analysis of the Cretaceous sediment was then aborted after a few days.
However, the other geology project showed interesting results and possibilities of further developments. The objective was to study a now dry modern stream bed based on its residual erosion traces like the width, depth of the bed or the inclination of the slope. From the data collected, we could obtain the past flow and average speed of water. The data sampling took a lot of time but the amount of points recorded was high enough to map the entirety of the study area and gave us a good model of the flow. By comparing this model with another one based only on the incoming flows from the secondary streams, we obtained a mean to evaluate the intensity of the soil infiltration in the different sectors of the main stream bed. Additional developments are possible, e.g. by widening the study area or a statistical approach. An expansion of this project will probably be submitted next year because we might consider making a new crew for the next season.
We are all satisfied with our simulation despite some adaptation challenges and some of us are thinking of applying for a next season to take this experience even further.