Science Report
Camila Castillo
10 Novermber 2017
Mars is pretty nice this night. There’s no cold in our little and warm hab and the night doesn’t seem as cold as ever.
This Science Report should be short because the main reason I’m writing this is because of the ovens at the lab. I’m using a little one and I would like to know if there is a problem with that one. I tried to set up another temperature and it just keeps getting warmer inside and doesn’t really mantain the temperature I originally intended. There are other two ovens, but it seems that they are a lot warmer than I need. I just want to set them up at a temperature near 25 °C.
As for the experiments, they are going well. It seems that the PC plates were well made and we could manage to keep an sterilized condition for making them. I’m expecting a package of Nutrient broth and Nutrient agar and it should be arriving this evening or even tomorrow. It will help a lot for my microbiological experiments.
Today we collected some soil and plant samples on the EVA. Our crew geologist keeps working on their characterization and I could train a bit of my plant systematics. I’m not an expert botanist, but I suppose you need to know a little bit of everything when you’re a scientist on Mars! (I’m learning so much about soils, it’s just crazy). It would be interesting if we get to know the microorganisms that live with these plants. This would be possible with the help of the Nutrient agar (That’s the one we usually use at my lab for this kind of samples).
I have some pretty crazy results on my pilot on the effects of dishwater on my raddish seeds. The ones that are growing the most are the seeds with 10% water and 90% dishwater! It’s really bugging me. I’ll need to follow them to know if they have some kind of alteration during their growing.