304-JournalistsReport

Journalist Report

Olenka Jibaja Valderrama

03/04/15

Hello Mission Support:

Yesterday we had a little problem with our project and we lost a lot of Nutella, so today we had to refill it. Jim Gora has seen so much of it that he doesn’t like it anymore! It took a long while to finish it, but we finally did I we hope we can try it tomorrow.

Romulo Cruz has analyzed the samples of soil he got from Morrison and Morrison formation Brushy Member, by the determination of pH. He took 20 grams of the soil and added 20 ml of water to get it pH. The samples from Morrison had a pH of around 8 and the ones from Morrison formation Brushy Member had 7. He has also been thinking about a project that consists in making a collection of rocks from the rocky formation all the crews visit, in order to have them in the Hab with pictures and information.

Jim Gora has made an image analysis to obtain the relief based on the shadows of the objects using a software called Matlab.

Luis has read papers to have back up information for the project he is developing. Sergio Postigo had implemented a system for his project that gets temperatures and humidity to find out the conditions in which the plants produce the most amount of oxygen.

I did my daily observations of the sweetpotato and radish plants. I have 9 samples of sweetpotato; everyday I take the amount of water they absorb and the stems growing from them, which will turn into sweetpotato plants in the future. Today I discovered that three of my samples have very little possibilities to grow stems or sprouts, but they are still in the Green Hab.

Daniel Rivas has been adjusting parameters of the electronic system of the gripping mechanism of his project. We have also been working on a new team project. It is a mechanism to put covers in the feet, those covers will be made of bags and they will help to avoid taking dirt to the Hab when we come back from EVAs.

Best regards,

Olenka Jibaja Valderrama

Journalist – Crew 150