Date: April 4, 2019
Author: Erika Rydberg
Getting into our Groove on Mars
Food is a central part of our day and that is the case, no matter which planet you find yourself on. Our routine helps guide journey here on Mars, it’s part of the reason why I like to include it in each day’s journalist report. We started the day with cereal and fresh oatmeal. This morning David and Amanda left that for a walking EVA to explore the local fossil beds and discovered many, many seashell fossils close by. We had a large print of a map of MDRS finish on one of our 3D printers, and also printed several useful items today on our other printer. We are also using glow-in-the-dark biodegradable filament to 3D print miniature scale models of MDRS structures designed during our mission to place on our 3D printed landscapes. We performed our daily duties through much of the afternoon and continued to perfect our research. We had a lunch of herbed couscous and smoothies and then, Dean, Julielynn and I left for a second rover EVA mission. Amanda and David stayed behind and continued their journeys on our bike-powered 3D printing project, both putting in an hour riding to charge our battery.
Now that we’re nearly done with our mission, we’re starting to wrap up some of our projects and research. With 3D printing, we sometimes think if only there was more time here on the Red Planet, we would be able to accomplish so much more. For those 3D printer enthusiasts out there, you may know a lot of working with these machines is also about patience and waiting. In the limited time we have we’ve been able to gather quite a bit of knowledge in our processes, projects, and research. We hope you’ve enjoyed taking the journey with us, we have only a few days left, until we blast off and return to our home planet.