Author: jburk

Sol 17

"Emergency return"

When the EVA team of the day was exploring the South area of the station
they faced strong winds and took the decision to get back to the
station. The beginning of the EVA rolled out fine : they went to the
weather station to do some maintenance, as usual. Then they headed
south. The first stop was done before the Kissing Camels Ridges. The
wind was still low enough, but it was getting colder. It’s at their
second stop that things started to get serious : after 10 minutes
walking, the wind increased dramatically and quickly, the EVA team was
starting to feel the cold of the wind through their gloves. It was
getting hard to hear other members through the radio, and the wind was
pushing them around. Cerise, EVA leader, took the right decision to
abort the EVA and head straight back to the rovers. The team drove right
back to the Hab. The wind strained to rover’s batteries quite a lot. The
team arrived in the Hab feeling frozen, but safe and sound.
This EVA was different from the rest of our mission, Cerise, Jérémy,
Aurélien and Norbert explored a wide region without a precise goal
except the will to explore and discover unknown areas. They drove the
rovers along Cow Dung Road and stopped each time they found a nice
geologic spot. That’s real exploration, like the first settlers will
have to do on Mars.

Today was a milestone for some of us, our mission will end in less than
two days and we started to realize that today. The effect on our
behaviors is strange : we have a foot on Earth but the other one still
sealed on Mars. On one hand it’s easier for us to live in this
philosophy as confinement has less weight on us. But on the other hand
the mission is one of the most intense moments of our lives that we
prepared for one year and it’s hard to see its end coming. Two of us
will return to the MDRS to be commander of the 2020 missions of
ISAE-SUPAERO but for the others these are certainly our last days on the
Red Planet. It affects the life of the Hab and the experiments. But it’s
very different from a crew member to another. For example Aurélien and
Norbert felt the end of the mission coming very fast while I’m still
feeling like an astronaut in the middle of its rotation, I was really
surprised when Aurélien told me that tomorrow we will start to pack our
luggage. The fact that in three days we will be on a plane to Paris
makes us feel different in these days than if we were in the middle of a
longer mission. We are thinking about the return more than ever and that
affects us, and I think that these days, like the first days of the
mission are less pertinent to the extent of science and human factors.
On Saturday, crew 207 will join us in the MDRS. The Hab and the crew
will be ready to welcome them and let them start science here.

Crew 206 – 03/12/2019

Sol 16

Authors : Benjamin Auzou, Journalist – Aurélien Murge, Astronomer and Executive Officer

"The force of the experience"

Our Association has been sending crew to the MDRS for five years. MDRS 151,164,175,189,206 are a ‘succession’ of experiences given each year to the new members. 22 French aeronautics and aerospace engineering students from ISAE-SUPAERO have worked to forge our knowledge about Martian simulations. At the beginning two veterans were part of the next crew with a shared leadership. Our crew is commanded by Jérémy, former GreenHab Officer. To continue the partnership with the MDRS and as we had this year in our association more than 30 applications for 2020 missions, the Station Director agreed to receive two French crews.
The whole crew is still undergraduate and next year will be in internship or universities all around the world. Two of us will command these crews but we can’t know yet who it will be. This is why the entire crew is trained to be commander. Everyone is taking in charge some communication windows, leading EVA’s, participating to the writing of the mission report and leading scientific experiments. Moreover, the whole crew is discussing about roles so that each member of the crew is aware of the basic knowledge of every role to be able to train the following crews.
That’s how our crews are based : experience. The members of the crews are selected, formed and advised by members of the previous missions. This allows us to have a good knowledge of the MDRS fundamentals and to deploy scientific experiments over the years. For example the aerosol counter (LOAC) analyzed the air of the desert in 2018 and in 2019 as well as the rover driving experiment ‘TELEOP’. We developed an app to help the leader of an EVA to take notes and follow protocols (created by Louis Mangin, Commander of crew 189 and improved by Gaspard, our crew engineer). And next year we will continue to work on improvement of our monitoring, but also take new experiments to the MDRS with two crews composed of talented and curious students from ISAE-SUPAERO. If you want to follow the preparation of the future missions of our association : call for projects, experiments, presentation of the crews, you can visit our Twitter account : @MDRSSupaeroCrew.

This week we continued to film moments of life and science to prepare the mission video. This video will be ready a few days after the end of the mission. What we are living for three weeks is incredible and the result of our year of preparation, and we are eager to share what we achieved with our relatives and all the people that follow our adventure. Here on Mars, our role is mainly scientific, but back on Earth our role will be more about popularizing our analog mission to children, to our friends, to our families.
These are the two goals of our association, the Club MARS from ISAE-SUPAERO : science for space and link with the public.