GreenHab Report – December 12th

GreenHab Report

Trisha Randazzo

December 12, 2017

Environmental control: (Choose which is appropriate and explain further if needed)

Ambient (no heating or/cooling)

Ambient with window/door open

·         Outside temperature during work hours:  9 C

·         At 10:05, inside temperature was 35 C. Opened door to cool.

·         Keep door open for most of the day. Closed around 16700, inside temperature was 17 C.

·         Inside temperature high 37 low 17

·         Inside humidity: 16%

Heating

·         Functioning nominally

·         Turns on at 16 C stops at 20 C

Cooling

·         Not available

Both heating and cooling

·         Nominal

Shade cloth on/off

·         On

Average temperature: (N/A until new sensor is delivered)

·         N/A

Changes to crops:  Note all emergence of seedlings, death of seedlings, etc

·         The original tomato plant is doing well!

·         Two of the four thinned tomato plants are improving!

·         The other two have no change

·         Moved tomato plants are doing well!

·         The little bean is doing well

·         No sprouts yet from the newly planted herb seeds. Expect some by next Monday!

Daily water usage for crops:

·         Some of the soil was extra dry

Time(s) of watering for crops:

·         16:57

Morning research observations: (Currently not operational)

·         N/A

Changes to research plants:

·         N/A

Daily watering and amount of water used:

·         2.5 gallons

Aquaponics:  (Currently not operational)

·         N/A

Narrative:  Any other information you want to share

·         N/A

Support/supplies needed:

·         Mission Control Requests:

o   Request for replanting plan for tomorrow:

§  The planter box closest to the door has about 20-30 seedlings. Permission to replant them into small, individual planters so the box has more space for the rest of the herbs.

Journalist Report – December 12th

Crew 184 Journalist Report

Willie Schumann

12 December 2017

Title                            Going Further, than Ever Before

Narrative                  As we are adapting to the Martian day and transitioning from Earth time we are currently staying longer awake and are getting up a little later. I was quite energetic and woke even up before my alarm clock. That gave me the chance to film everyone coming out of their sleeping chamber, which are aligned in a little row next to one another.

Because we sleep longer now we went right on an EVA to Matryoshka Site number five after breakfast. Science Officer Trivedi took the lead, while Doctor Sczepaniak was still very sleepy. As he is anyway quite stoic and monosyllabic we were wondering if he is sleepwalking. I personally thought we have to reanimate him right there in the pre-breathing chamber. But we better leave that to the Doc. Wait a minute…

Today I actually wanted to take the ATV to drive by myself, but as we didn’t put this in the EVA request we had to follow protocol and postpone my personal Martian roadtrip desire to another day. Already in the past days it is one of the hardest challenges to pinpoint the exact spot of our Matryoshka sites as we have to compare the over view satellite pictures to the reality beneath our feet. To complicate things even more two crewmembers of this Mars mission are European and use the metric system instead of the imperial one. So you not only have to be a good a good geologists and pathfinder to master these tasks, but also a mathematician.

As so we took quite an interesting detour, which took us further north on Mars, then ever before. Around the site of the yellow moon we took our rover on a little rollercoaster. Facing a mountain comb we went up and down heavy slopes. The ATV could manage without problems but we were really careful with our rover. When we reached a every high elevation we faced an insane downfall.

We decided to check our geo position again, to make sure, that it was the right site. The ride down and the following climb would be too intense, considering it might not even be the spot we were supposed to be at. And after a short reassessment we realized, that we were a bit too far west from our exploartaion site. We turned and reached our final destination, the meaningful beige moon, shortly after.

 While the Doc was seemingly still sleeping Science Officer Trivedi got very much excited looking at three elevations following shortly after one another. Let’s call them the three hills of the beige moon. Trivedi climbed on the peak of each of them and really dug deep for chemically pure probes of rocks. He got completed dusted and had to remove his pilot suit, after his return to the hab.

While on site he collected strange orange rocks and was fascinated by white shimmering stones further down north. When we went there we discovered that these rocks looked somewhat similar to quartz-stones and reflected the sun light to us. We collected the samples and will to analyze them in the hab lab.

I used this remote spot to make an interview with the Doc, who was still sleepy, but in a very pleasant Zen mode. As he is a man of faith we talked about the question, if the God the humans believe in, is also looking over us Martians? He surely believed so and is poised, that his heroic efforts on the red planet will possibly lead others to come to Mars and to find God here as well.

Maybe a higher force was already looking over us, when we returned to the base. We quickly felt, that the rover was a bit slower than usually and that there was a sensation, if someone was slightly pushing the break. We observed the vehicle superficially, but couldn’t find anything. We blamed it on the dirt and hoped it will fall off. As we continued I noticed that our trustful rover was losing battery level by the minute, which we never noticed before. Within a short period it dropped from 60% to 40%, which made me really worry.

Fortunately the habitat was already on the horizon and we literally slowly turned into the final lane. By then the battery was down to thirty percent and was more or less only crouching to it’s final parking spot. I was getting out of the rover to release it from weight, but I swear the chocolate cake of First Officer Randazzo yesterday night couldn’t have been the problem.

We made it home and will assess the battery problem of the rover tomorrow at sun light. As we have a massive arsenal of vehicles we will definitely be fine and I am sure our handy crew engineer will take care of the faulty one.

Personal Logbook             It was great getting out again and Mars didn’t disappoint us once again. The weather is always great here and the sun strong. For me as photographer the conditions are perfect so far.

It was also inspiring to see new horizons and landscapes once again and to have purpose. When I am stuck in the habitat I sometimes feel a bit if I would lose time.

I think my experiments with the new helmet are completed and it works very good. Nonetheless I will step back to the original helmet, to feel the experience of the other crewmembers had in the past days.

Thank you very much for your help and attention.

Willie Schumann, Journalist, Crew 184

Sol Summary – December 12th

Summary Title:  Getting back on routine (and our first EVA failure!).

Mission Status:

Today was a successful day and will hopefully  mark out the routine we will follow until the end of our mission.  The generator has been completely functional now for two days since our repairs over the weekend which is thankful news, our power problems seem to have abated themselves for the mission (though I may be jinxing myself. . . .).  In addition, the weather has been getting warmer which is a welcome relief and allows me to finally stop wearing my thermals, which is a welcome relief as they could sorely use a wash!

We resumed this week’s round of Matryoshka EVAs with a successful visit and sample collection to Site #5.  Just two more sites to go and we will have completed our most important EVA objective of our mission.  We managed to collect several soil and rock samples from what appeared to look like river channels. We saw shiny glinting on the hills too and found some shale like specimens for analysis. All in all a successful EVA! One thing that has come about is the hazard of the strong sunlight in your face reducing visibility, as there is no sun visor on the helmet and sunglasses are not recommended. Luckily it caused no issues on this EVA, but could potentially be dangerous if sunglasses are to remain forbidden and visors are not added to EVA helmets.

During the EVA return our EVA crew encountered a failure with the Deimos Rover.

Deimos left the HAB at SOC 100% and was driven for ~ 45 minutes to the site with no issues.

When returning from EVA site Deimos started experiencing significant mechanical drag that both lowered the achievable rover speed and increased battery drain.  This problem persisted for roughly 30 minutes until the Rover was able to return to base.  From the onset of the problem it was roughly steady until the turn was made off of cowdung road to return to the HAB.  At that time Rover performance precipitously dropped and was able to achieve little more than walking speed.  Steering was also noticed to be stiff during the return from EVA site.

The EVA crew reports that from a driving perspective it felt like the parking break was on, though visual inspection showed this was not actually the case.  The root cause of the issue was not determined though we will do an inspection during tomorrows EVA.  We suspect the issue may be due to debris in Deimos’s drive train.

At the end of the EVA Deimos was at 29% which is unusual given Deimos’s long range and is likely related to the experienced ‘drag’ when driving Deimos.

For the folks left behind today we were primarily occupied with Solar observation which showed numerous impressive features that made observing a treat.  The sun is waking up!  Hopefully it stays active for the next few days and into the next mission.

We are entering the period of our mission where our Martian Sleep Schedule has moved our days ‘out of phase’ with Earth normal.  Tonight we will be going to sleep at 2:40am and waking up at 10:40am.  We have been primarily occupying our nights with cleaning, Bricks, Anesthesia training, and general maintenance to prepare ourselves to fully utilize the next day’s daylight hours.  Our team has adjusted to the schedule well so far with crew taking naps as needed to stay on schedule.

Thanks for your help!

Sol Activity Summary:

  1. Matryoshka EVA Site #5
  2. ‘Bricks’ communication experiment
  3. Solar Observation
  4. Exercise
  5. General HAB Cleaning / Maintenance / Reports
  6. EVA Suit Inspection / Maintenance

Look Ahead Plan:

  1. Matryoshka EVA Site #6
  2. ‘Bricks’ communication experiment
  3. Solar Observation
  4. Anesthesia Experiment Runs
  5. Exercise
  6. General HAB Cleaning / Maintenance / Reports
  7. Deimos Troubleshooting


Anomalies in work:

1.    HAB Leak from under EVA door (not noticeable today)

2.  Power System Misconfiguration ongoing.

3.  Deimos Rover (see above)

Weather: Mild

Crew Physical Status: All crew in good physical health.

EVA: See Above

Reports to be filed:

Greenhab

Operations

EVA Request

Sol Summary

Journalist

Astronomy

HSO

Support Requested:

1.    ATV Fuel (we are empty)

2.  Burnable / Non Burnable Trash Pickup from Rear Airlock

3.  Permission to replant seedlings into individual planters so herbs have clean soil.  See Greenhab Report for details.

4.  We have an extra CO detector that is marked ‘For Greenhab’.  The current detector in Greenhab is both a Smoke Alarm / CO Sensor.  Please advise whether you would like us to install a redundant CO Sensor in the Greenhab or return it to the HAB and mark it as a replacement part.

5.     Food Re-Supply

    1. 1 Box Raisin Bran
    2. 1 Box Powdered Milk
    3. 24 packs Instant Ramen
    4. 3 Boxes Pasta (any type)
    5. 2 Box Granola Bars
    6. 1 Box Saltine Cracker
    7. 1 Box Cracker (any type)
    8. 1 Box Hot Chocolate
    9. 1 Box Red Lobster Biscuits
    10. 1 Box Earl Grey Tea
    11. 1 Pack Chocolate Chips
    12. 1 Pack Tortillas
    13. 1 Pack Sour Cream\
    14. 1 Can SPAM
    15. 2 Can Chicken
    16. 1 Can Strawberries
    17. 1 Box Granola
    18. 1 Bottle Soy Sauce

Astronomy Report – December 12th

Name:   Thomas Horn    Crew: 184
Date: 12/12/17

Sky Conditions: Clear

Wind Conditions: Light Winds

Observation Start Time: 11:30am

Observation End Time: 2:30pm

Summary:   We were able to observe three prominence’s on the limb of the sun which were visible using the eyepiece as well as the camera.  They are imaged below.  In the raw image it was impossible to view the prominence and the sun surface at the same time (as expected).  We are novices at photoshop, but attempted to optimize different parts of the picture for different settings to allow both features to be present in the same image.  Images of the three prominence’s are attached that were experimented with.  If anyone has advice or instructions on how to better utilize Photoshop to allow two very different features to show through in the same image it would be welcomed.

Hoping this solar activity continues!

Objects Viewed: 3 Solar Prominences



Problems Encountered: None

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