Pathfinder
"Sometimes life is like this dark tunnel. You can’t always see the light at the end of the tunnel, but if you just keep moving… you will come to a better place." – Uncle Iroh
In 1997, NASA landed the Mars Pathfinder mission on Ares Vallis, where it would successfully deliver an instrumented lander and the Sojourner rover, the first-ever robotic rover to land and operate on the Martian surface. Pathfinder also returned a then-unprecedented amount of data and outlived its primary design life. At that time, the Internet was still in its infancy, but that is not the main challenge behind missions to the Red Planet.
What most people might not remember about coming to Mars is the fact that we are 12-light minutes away from Earth, meaning that humans are completely blind to current circumstances until 12 minutes after it has already happened. Most of the systems that go to Mars, then, are heavily autonomous, ensuring that time delay will not lead to a critical failure that is only noticed way after. These circumstances make it necessary to operate with a strategy that considers all possible outcomes, much like a game of chess that our Mr. Fix It enjoys playing so much while confined in the hab. Let’s hope that his strategy skills will save us from being permanently stranded here on Mars.
Luckily for him, in Sol 6, he set out in an EVA to Eon Chasma together with Spy and Messiah for a mission through the depths of a narrow opening on the ground. It can be quite intimidating, however, to forge a path forward inside a place where communication with the only human support we can get from the hab could fail at any moment. Genie kept in touch with them as the CAPCOM, although the communication was more often than not obfuscated by the environment around the EVA team. Commander Messiah himself also felt apprehensive with such a long way to go, where following rivers could be the only way towards their goal. After what felt like 4 long hours for us back in the hab, they rushed back home safe and sound in what felt for them as the quickest hike of their lives.
In the meantime, I was working on my own version of an instrumented lander from Mars Pathfinder: our mascot, the DRONE. The research has been challenging, however, since transforming the readings from raw data into terrain mappings is no easy task – especially when there is no internet here to help debug so many scripts. Well, I guess if Pathfinder managed to create a drone no short of magical without internet, there might be a way of finding a path forward here as well.
After lunch, our crew sat together for one of our nemeses here on Mars: the cognitive task puzzles from Spy’s experiment. We quickly found out through these tasks that Crew Montes has many types of people, but no quitters. Time limits mean nothing to us, and we will fight these puzzles to the death if needed. Even if they leave us exhausted, we will keep trying to find a way of solving them until we have absolutely no more ways to go.
Not only time delays and internet connection are our challenges here on Mars, though. Murph’s work in the Science Dome has been complicated quite a bit by the limited humidity available for her mushrooms, given the conditions of their controlled environment. What’s more, quite a bit of work without the option of going out for a run has been leaving her tired beyond measures. Even though she’s been struggling with making this work while also taking care of their feeding, sensors and the plants in the Green Hab, she has already been able to find a path so far multiple times, so I’m sure she will overcome this small barrier in no time.
Now that we’ve reached the halfway point in our mission, we are shaping up to get our research goals done and are more motivated than ever to provide the best we can offer for the next generations of space explorers. Even throughout many challenges, more than anything our hope is that we can leave a path to trace. A path forward so that anyone can find their way to Mars.
Hermit out.