Commander Report – March 1st

Crew 189 Commander Report 01Mar2018

Sol 11
Today started with a long EVA on the outside lead by Alexandre, to explore Lith Canyon. It was also the first time that an EVA left Victoria and I in the Hab, so that no senior crewmembers were on the outside. Quite a strange feeling to let our fellow crewmembers take care of themselves after having watched over them for more than 10 days, but surely normal and necessary. Obviously, nothing went wrong, and they managed their time well.

The only problem we faced today was walkie-talkies working very poorly, probably due to the weather. Gabriel, being Habcom struggled giving instructions to the team while we were hearing what was happening on the outside. It was very frustrating, and lead to some minor misunderstanding, and the EVA team having to knock at the door… We planned to investigate further on that tomorrow, to try to understand better the talkies ranges.

During the afternoon, we struggled defusing bombs while playing Gabriel’s experiment. It is very enriching as you can see accentuated personalities, and group dynamics in action. It surely helps us communicate efficiently, avoid common mistakes while trying to hurry.

The game is very frustrating as you have to deal with missing (and sometimes false) information to help a defuser you cannot see, obviously leading to mistakes. As everybody here is very competitive and wants to score as much as possible, the result might be very funny to watch from the outside. We had our series of success, failures or rage, and it clearly kept everybody awake.

We then spent time working on several experiments, and for instance, I helped Benoit on GPS navigation today. Very cool to come back to some low-level development to create a simple user interface to be used in EVA!
Everybody seems to be fine at Sol 11, exercising well, being in a good mood. Food supplies are more than half full, so that we might start increasing the doses, to help us live this last week to come on Mars!

Louis Mangin,
Crew 189 Commander

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