Category: Sol Summary

Crew 206 March 15th 2019
Sol 19

Summary Title : Wrapping up the Sim

Author : Jeremy Auclair

Mission Status : All nominal

Sol Activity Summary : Today is our last “routine” day. We gave everything we had for the workout session, we ate quickly to be ready on time for the EVA which was earlier than usual. Half of the crew went exploring the ends of Galileo road while the other half started packing and continued cleaning the Hab, with only a few rest moments in the morning. The EVA teamed wrapped up the Weather station and LOAC disassembly around 10:30 am, and after they had arranged their equipment we started cleaning the lower deck. Everyone has a lot to do today, and we kept this fast pace all day long. At 11:30 am we started working on the daily reports and the preparation of lunch. After a copious meal, we went all around the station to pack our small equipment, film some last scenes and gather the last experimental
data. Even on this busy day we had to do the TELEOP session and the VR experiment, for the last time. The important end of mission reports are already done, so we are a little ahead of schedule. After the VR session, at 18h00, we opened the main airlock to breathe some fresh and absorb the sunlight. This is the end, we stayed outside for more than 45 minutes, taking in the surroundings for one last time. We are happy of the work we did, the experiences we lived and the memories we formed.

Look ahead plan : We are looking forward to meeting Crew 207, it will feel good to meet some new faces after 3 weeks of isolation. There is still work to do before leaving but the vast majority has been done. We will keep some personal time tomorrow morning to watch the sunrise from the Hab ridge, and perhaps jog towards the Mesa.

Anomalies in work : None

Weather : Sunny all day

Crew physical status : Fine

EVA : Weather station and LOAC disassembly and Galileo road exploration

Reports to be filed : GreenHab, Journalist, Operation, EVA Request, EVA Report

Support Requested : None

Crew 206 March 14th 2019
Sol 18

Summary Title : Spring cleaning

Author : Jeremy Auclair

Mission Status : All nominal

Sol Activity Summary : This night it was a little bit colder in the Hab,
we all slept much better. The day started beautifully, but unfortunately
during our morning workout one of the crew members pulled a few muscles
on his/her back. It hurt pretty bad but it’s nothing serious. He/her
therefore couldn’t go on EVA, so I took the leadership of this EVA.
After changing the LOAC battery we took the rovers to go to galileo
road. Once there we continued driving a little until we saw the plain
and the river bank ahead of us. At this point we started walking. It was
a beautifull hike, the scenery was out of this world, we walked to the
begining of Candor Chasma. At this point we decided to head back to the
rovers in case one of us started to feel to tired. We ended the EVA at
11:20 am without any issue. After a nice lunch, we started cleaning the
whole Hab, for more than an hour. We will continue tomorrw and saturday.
Before the VR experiment we also filmed some short videos for french
middle school students, as part of our association’s science
popularization for underpriviledge children.

Look ahead plan : Tomorrow will be split in two parts : finishing our
last experiments and finishing cleaning and tidying up the Hab.

Anomalies in work : None

Weather : Cloudy up to 11:00 am, sunny afterwards.

Crew physical status : One of the crew members has a strong back ache,
but nothing serious.

EVA : Weather station maintenance and Galileo road exploration

Reports to be filed : GreenHab, Journalist, Operation, EVA Request, EVA
Report, HSO Report

Support Requested : None

Crew 206 March 13th 2019
Sol 17

Summary Title : Last days on Mars

Author : Jeremy Auclair

Mission Status : All nominal

Sol Activity Summary : In two days we are going to break the simulation
and wrap up all our experiments, it will be the end of a great
adventure. We are feeling this, everything is going faster, days are
flying by. We are savouring these last days. This morning went fine,
although we had to shorten our EVA. While we were exploring, and after
the weather station maintenance, the wind started increasing greatly, to
the point where we hard a hard time hearing ourselves in the radio and
we were being pushed around. We headed straight back to the rovers and
drove back to the Hab. Nothing bad happened. The wind has been blowing
strong since then. The weather station is still up. This afternoon was
quite busy : the TELEOP session went fine and due to planning
constraints we all had to watch VR videos, which took some time. All our
experiments are going fine, although the crew is being less attentive to
water consumption measurement.

Look ahead plan : Tomorrow’s EVA will be used to test the prototype
space suit again.

Anomalies in work : None

Weather : Cloudy all day, very windy since 10:00 am

Crew physical status : Fine

EVA : Weather station maintenance and South MDRS exploration

Reports to be filed : GreenHab, Journalist, Operation, EVA Request, EVA
Report

Support Requested : MDRS weather station data access.

Crew 206 March 12th 2019
Sol 16

Summary Title :

Author : Jeremy Auclair

Mission Status : All nominal

Sol Activity Summary : This morning we managed to get up a little earlier and to start the workout session on time. The planned EVA went fine. The purpose was to change the LOAC’s battery and to continue training the non-veteran crew members, two of them will be commanders next year, so it is very important to have every detail of a MDRS mission mastered. They went to white rock canyon to do some exploration and take some footage. Gaspard’s app also worked today : he is developing an app to improve EVA tracking by allowing the leader to enter data on his phone only by clicking on the screen (with the glove). This app was developed by Louis Mangin (Crew 189 Commander) last year, and this app was further developed by Gaspard this year. This afternoon we didn’t have any TELEOP session so we took some time for ourselves. More than half of the crew took a nap, and we are feeling better tonight. The VR videos we watched are quite impressive, beautifull and relaxing. The crew is feeling well this last week and will work as hard as the two other weeks.

Look ahead plan : In the next few days, for our last EVAs we will try to explore some places we haven’t explored yet, and start analysing some of the collected data we can analyse.

Anomalies in work : None

Weather : Cloudy all day

Crew physical status : Fine

EVA : LOAC Maintenance and White Rock Canyon exploration

Reports to be filed : GreenHab, Journalist, Operation, EVA Request, EVA Report

Support Requested : None

Crew 206 March 11th 2019
Sol 15

Summary Title : Weather Station round 2

Author : Jeremy Auclair

Mission Status : All nominal

Sol Activity Summary : We woke up still tired this morning, but
motivated to finish the mission as best we could. We continued filming a
lot of different scenes all day, this kind of changes our everyday
experience. This morning’s EVA was a success : we installed the weather
station and the LOAC again, but we anchored the base much more strongly
to the ground, it seems perfectly aligned, and we are getting the data.
This has also ended the 4 days of interior measurements, we are eager to
see the results of air quality we are breathing. This afternoon we
continued the TELEOP sessions, everything is running fine and we are not
encountering issues anymore. It feels good to finally have a working
set-sup after so much work. It’s also our last VR week, we are seeing
some pretty footage for the last time.

Look ahead plan : Tomorrow we will change the LOAC battery to make sure
it doesn’t turn off, we will try to visit white rock canyon and we will
pursue our experiments.

Anomalies in work : None

Weather : Quite sunny until 4:30 pm, Cloudy after that

Crew physical status : Fine

EVA : LOAC and weather station installation

Reports to be filed : GreenHab, Journalist, Operation, EVA Request, EVA
Report

Support Requested : None

Crew 206 March 10th 2019 Sol 14

Summary Title : Light (and rest) saving day

Author : Jeremy Auclair

Mission Status : All nominal

Sol Activity Summary : Today was our rest day, se didn’t put any alarms
for waking up, with the day light saving hour change we woke up around
09-10:00 am to have breakfast. It feels really good to take a day off
and not follow any schedule. We spent most of the day playing cards and
talking, we saw a funny stupid movie before lunch. We will be much more
efficient and motivated tomorrow and the rest of the day. As every day
we had our debating time, that was about humour and its impacts on the
society for today.

Our Crew writer explained us his plan for our Crew post mission video
and we have started the shootings today.

Look ahead plan : This week we have to plan an EVA to bring the LOAC out
of the station again, we have gathered enough data inside the station.

Anomalies in work : None

Weather : Cloudy all day with a few sunshines

Crew physical status : Fine

EVA : None

Reports to be filed : GreenHab, Journalist, Operation, EVA Request

Support Requested : None

Crew 206 March 9th, 2019
Sol 13

Summary Title: TELEOP catch-up

Author: Jeremy Auclair

Mission Status: All nominal

Sol Activity Summary: It is getting harder and harder for me to wake up in the morning, but I still stick to the morning routine, as all of the crew does. Today is the last working day of our week, and we worked well.

The EVA went beautifully. We explored the east and west Kissing Camels ridges and took great pictures. The EVA was also meant to continue the tests of our prototype simulation space suit. The little upgrades that were made improved the suit quite a bit: it was less hard to carry, ventilation and sun protection worked better and the battery lasted more than long enough for the whole EVA.

This afternoon also saw the completion of the TELEOP second week: we managed to gather additional data to catch up on the sessions that were missed, and I haven’t encountered any additional issues with the physical rover (great difference with last year’s sessions). We ended this work week with the VR session, that also allowed us to talk about the videos we had seen, and opinions differ regarding what video was preferred.

Look ahead plan: Tomorrow will be a rest day, we will still have to
work on our rotation video and on a few experiments, but it will be
calmer than today.

Anomalies in work : None

Weather : Cloudy all day with some sunshine.

Crew physical status : Fine

EVA : Kissing Camels

Reports to be filed : GreenHab, Journalist, Operation, EVA Report

Support Requested : None

Crew 206 March 8th 2019
Sol 12

Summary Title :

Author : Jeremy Auclair

Mission Status : All nominal

Sol Activity Summary : Since the begining of the week we are waking up
one or two minutes later every day, tomorrow we will have to get back in
track ! We still do our workout sessions as seriously as the first day
though, our scores have greatly increased. With the lack of an EVA we
decided to clean the Hab again, the dust settles everywhere so quickly
that it’s a necessity. We also had some long discussions on the methods
we use to measure the water consuption of flushes, we have to continue
averaging the water volume over many toilet flushes. For lunch we
prepared some pizzas, we ate a wonderfull lunch that made us all happy.
After that we played some Tarot, a popular french card game. In the
afternoon there was a TELEOP session, it worked fine, this experiment is
back on track ! As planned, there was also a VR session, we are
continuing to gather data.

Look ahead plan : We hope to go on EVA tomorrow but the weather doesn’t
seem promising, so we might just continue our indoor experiments in the
next days.

Anomalies in work : None

Weather : Cloudy all day with a few sunshines

Crew physical status : Fine

EVA : None

Reports to be filed : GreenHab, Journalist, Operation, EVA Request is
weather allows it

Support Requested : None

Crew 206 March 7th 2019
Sol 11

Summary Title : Preparing for the Gale force winds

Author : Jeremy Auclair

Mission Status : All nominal

Sol Activity Summary : Waking up is becoming harder and harder for me, even if I sleep as much as before. Some of us sleep better and some of us sleep worse than usual, confinement and isolation have different effects on different people. We are nonetheless sticking to our strict daily routine : wake up at 07:00 am, sport and breakfast. The EVA’s purpose was to asses the damage on the weather station (that tipped over yesterday due to the winds) and the LOAC, and to dismantle the instruments to bring them back to the Hab. The weather cock on the station broke, but the sensor is still operationnal. The rest of the equipment is intact. For the rest of the EVA the team attached more tightly all the tarps that cover the tunnels.
Today is Cerise’s birthday, so the crew prepared a very nice lunch, and Cerise prepared a great chocolate cake. We had a very nice time. In the afternoon we were able to run a digital TELEOP session with the new computer station we received, so we are now collecting twice as much data, things all finaly looking good for TELEOP. The wind is sporadically blowing hard on the station, we hope that it won’t be too bad in the next few days.

Look ahead plan : Almost all our experiments are running fine, except the weather station. We will take advantage of the fact that the LOAC is inside to measure the quality of the air we breathe.

Anomalies in work : None

Weather : Sunny between 11 am and 12 am, Cloudy for the rest of the day

Crew physical status : Fine

EVA : LOAC and weather station dismantling

Reports to be filed : GreenHab, Journalist, Operation, EVA Report, EVA Request

Support Requested : Cooking whip and pressurized air can

Crew 206 March 6th 2019
Sol 10

Summary Title : Windy day

Author : Jeremy Auclair

Mission Status : All nominal

Sol Activity Summary : We got up a little after 07:00 am to begin the work out. The sun wasn’t shining this morning, but we were feeling great. At 09:00 am we were almost ready for EVA, the new LOAC battery was fully charged. Outside the ground was pretty dry, we went straight to the weather station to do a quick maintenance. After that we went north instead of going to kissing camels, CNN’s filming crew was still arriving, so we didn’t want to hold anyone up. After 10 minutes of driving we stopped to start our exploration. We discovered that the camera had no SD card, so we couldn’t take any pictures. We walked east towards a canyon that wasn’t noted on the map. After a little walking it started raining lightly, so by precaution we decided to go back to the rovers in case the rain didn’t stop, but after 4-5 minutes it did stop. We took the rovers to go to reservoir dam, to explore it. When the CNN filming crew left the Hab we went back to the Hab. During that time the two others were in the science dome. This afternoon I was interviewed by CNN, the rest of the crew worked on their experiments. In the afternoon the wind started to go up a lot, we noticed that it had tiped over the weather station and the LOAC, we need to fix it quickly.

Look ahead plan : We hope to be able to go on EVA tomorrow to fix the LOAC, but the weather doesn’t look like it wants us to go out.

Anomalies in work : None

Weather : Cloudy all day, high winds in the afternoon

Crew physical status : Fine

EVA : LOAC maintenance and Reservoir Dam exploration

Reports to be filed : GreenHab, Journalist, Operation, EVA Report, EVA
Request, Science Report

Support Requested : Tissues