Month: March 2022

Sol 12 – Bad weather, good times

Author: Nicolas Wattelle

The weather is definitely not kind to us, it pushes us to take some forced rest. Outside, the wind strongly blows, the rain and hail fall, and snow is to come during the night…

On one hand, technically speaking, it means taking the LOAC (aerosol meter) back in the Hab, because it might not survive under the snow, do maintenance on our HF antenna which is put to trouble by the wind, and hope the batteries are empty until tomorrow morning…

On the other hand, today’s experiments needed an outside intervention (geology, Augmented Reality, HF propagation…), more than just doing maintenance around the Hab, so we were stuck on these points.

So, we decided yesterday’s evening to “advance” our rest day, because of this, also because we did not want to lose efficiency in our upcoming work, we try thus to avoid tiredness: after the maintenance EVA, our afternoon would be declared empty, a time to breath, a time to relax.

We are finishing our second week on Mars, and even if some of the last days were not that intense, we lately feel more frequently tired. Maybe the weight of the simulation, maybe the repetitiveness of actions during the days, maybe the accumulation of little frustrations that are taken individually means almost nothing but when added it gets revealed to day light… Maybe a mix of all of that.

Even if we do not know exactly why, one of our strengths is to know how to overcome it: relax! And guess what, we are particularly good at it!

Our afternoon was thus focused on making us having a great time, cooking, chatting, living good! Some of us played games, others drew and painted, listened to music.

This looked like last Sunday, even if outside the bad weather strikes, inside the Hab it is bright and sunny!

Sol 11 – . – – . – – . – – . . . . . – !

Author: Nicolas Wattelle

Translate: « We made it! ». We made contact with the other Martian base (radio club in Toulouse, France)! In fact, we heard their signals but we are not sure if we were heard… The Sun has been nice to us for some days, and has charged the ionosphere enough to allow propagation!

The established protocol uses 3 modes of modulation (ways to transform our wave to send a message with it) with names that might scare some of you: FT8, CW and SSB. Here again, translate “digital mode” (only decodable with a computer), “MORSE mode”, and “voice mode”. On paper, we maximise our chances to make contact with the first one but we cannot send much information in each message, and the last one is the most uncertain but really facilitates communication. We tried two ranges of frequencies, around 21MHz and 28MHz. We don’t really know why, but today the MORSE mode has been the most efficient one, and the only one to work, and we finally heard something! Valentine and I were very excited while discovering our callsigns (KK7DAC and KK7DAE, lovely) followed by the REF 31 radio club one (F5KSE) in a message received near 9:17 am. Listen: 3 weeks ago, we took almost 13 hours travelling to MDRS from France, and now, at the speed of light, our waves took about a hundredth of a second to do the same course and deliver a message (without any intermediate, no satellite, no internet, no wire…). It is nice to see that the physics we learnt at school works effectively, in a big scale personal experiment! We hope to have the same (or even more) luck next Thursday, when we will try the contact for a last time, always using Zenith Antennes and ICOM devices.

In our propagation study we saw a very good one this morning, but the wind that appeared around noon significantly moved our antennas, and now we need to correctly set them again during an EVA… The weather cannot always be by our side…

On this subject, because of the rain probability, we could not do the geology EVA that was planned this morning. So, our day has had to be reorganised. Some of us took some rest, because here, we all have some moments of tiredness these days. Mathéo and Cerise decided to make cookies for the whole crew, which put us in a very good mood! Pictures to follow…

Yesterday, just when I finished my report, we had a strange exercise. Valentine set an emergency protocol exercise, inside the Hab. The situation was: there is a hole in the module, air is leaking out, the pressure is going low. How to react? We followed a protocol made by a middle school class in Toulouse, with which we have collaborated some months ago. No need to worry, it went (quite) well. We need to admit that during the first minute we were disorganised, but we managed to apply the protocol in time, and everyone was safe at the end. It was very interesting!