Crew 184 Sol Summary Report 05 Dec 2017
MDRS Sol Summary Report for Sol 4
Summary Title: Our first failure and major replan
Mission Status: Today was a hectic day with three major failures our
team dealt with.
1. Internet – Between 8:30am and 9:30am 800MB of bandwidth was
utilized. It is unknown what caused this but likely culprit was a
device being left on and doing a software update in the background.
Internet communication was lost at this time. These reports are being
delivered by Shannon today.
2. Water – During our morning fill of the loft tank the pump
was non-functional. Possible causes were quickly narrowed down to
either a frozen pipe due to the below freezing temperatures or a
clogged filter. Our team immediately switched to using bottled water
which we keep as an emergency reserve while we troubleshot the issue.
At 1pm we called Mission Control for advice who recommended we connect
the pipe heating system and wait till midday, this resolved the issue
around 3pm and water was restored to the HAB
3. Power – During our morning check of SOC it was noted that
the generator was not running, having failed sometime during the
night, and that SOC was at 3%. We immediately instituted a shutdown
of MDRS powered equipment to preserve what little power we had and
investigated the generator. It was noted that a significant oil leak
had developed from the oil cap, upon tightening the cap the leak
stopped and the generator was restarted. When returning to the
science dome it was observed that SOC was hovering around 10% and did
not appear to be charging. After consultation with Mission Control it
was discovered that the generator was in idle due to the power system
not requesting it to go to full delivered power given the fact that
the solar array system was charging the battiers (however slowly) .
In addition the SOC was likely incorrect due to it being a calculated
value and us confusing it due to going off scale. We will assess SOC
tonight after a full day in the sun and decide forward plan.
Our morning was mostly consumed with maintenance and troubleshooting,
we quickly discovered that when receiving failures our level of
knowledge of the systems was exhausted in how to troubleshoot,
recommend future crew get access to and study manuals for MDRS
equipment prior to stay.
In the afternoon when we got our facilities in a stable configuratrion
four members of our team went on our first Matryoshka EVA. We were
able to go to the Kissing Camel ridge and collect two samples, however
we were unable to go to the other site in URC South due to delays in
getting out since we had to fix our non-nominal systems.
The two sample we collected were to highlight interesting
geomorphological features to be used in outreach activities back in
Oxford. The strike and dip of the ridge component the first sample was
extracted from was also taken. The intention of sample collection and
strike and dip measurement is to determine whether satellite and
outcrop scale imagery data is reliable at predicting these.
Sol Activity Summary:
1. Troubleshooting and EVA as discussed above
2. Exercise
3. Assembling of exercise equipment using martian dirt
(medicine ball complete!)
4. HAB Cleaning
5. Solar observation
Look Ahead Plan:
With internet down we are unable to contact our scheduling team. We
will receive the schedule in the morning when internet bandwidth
restarts and go over it as a team to plan our day.
Anomalies in work:
1. Yamaha 250 ATV #3 wheel deemed non-recoverable. We have
parked it off to the side for mission support. Photos of damage
attached.
Weather: Very cold! It was below freezing for most of the day.
Crew Physical Status: All in good health.
EVA: Delayed due to non-nominal systems, so we are requesting the same
EVA from Sol 3 but just for site A (mound on URC South) to finish off
the sample collection. The plan and crew utilised will be the exact
same as today.
Reports to be file:
Greenhab
Operations
Astronomy
EVA Request
Journalist
Sol Summary
Support Requested:
Trash placed in the Rear Airlock for pickup. Burnable trash on the
side with the box. Non-burnable trash on the other side.