Crew 189 Commander Report 20Feb2018
Sol 2
Today was probably our first “normal” day: everything is now almost
set up, excluding our experiments, that are for most of them already
facing some predictable minor issues. It is also the day I started to
monitor our water consumption. Like during our previous rotation, we
keep track of filtered water, greenhab water, cooking water, flushes
and showers, to understand our consumption better.
We woke up at 7:00 am, exercised together, and took extra time to
prepare ourselves better for our second EVA. This one had a bigger
scientific role than yesterday’s one: we wanted to deploy both the
MegaAres and the LOAC near Pooh’s Corner, in the spot we had chosen
yesterday. My fellow commander Victoria who was EVA leader today, went
with Jérémy, Gabriel, Benoit and one of our school’s mascot to the
work place. They first tried to deploy the LOAC experiment, but a wire
connection blocked the deployment. After this first failure, they
worked altogether on the MegaARES. Two hours, 10 nails, and many
screws later, it was operational and they all went back happy of this
EVA, looking forward to deploying the other experiments. Stay tuned
tomorrow to know more about the LOAC deployment.
At the same time in the hab, we cooked, kept assembling Laurent’s
solar panels cleaners, and dissembled the water boiler to try to fix
it. It was only when Benoit came back with the voltmeter that he
managed to fix it with a little soldering. This may seem secondary,
but the whole food needs to be rehydrated using boiling water so that
a working boiler allows us to accelerate every meal preparation. I
then tried to bake bread and ended up messing with cups and US
tablespoon so that we had to rename it “the Rock”…
This afternoon started by a victory from the commander’s duo in our
French card game “coinche” at the end of lunch break. Then, we
experienced several informatic problems while trying to launch our
human factor experiments, but nothing serious. We will just have to
wait for one more day to launch these. The end of the afternoon was
quiet as everybody was busy working on experiments and reports.
Ad Astra!