Day: December 10, 2019

Crew 217 Sol Summary Report 10-DEC-2019

Sol: 1

Summary Title: The First Day on Mars aka Taco Tuesday

Author’s name: Shannon Rupert

Mission Status: Our Mission is in full swing. We awoke to our first Martian day and made the most of it.

Sol Activity Summary: We spent the morning sharing our teaching experiences and activities, and at one point while I was smashing #10 cans on the upper deck, the crew was busy downstairs creating a habitat out of cups, plates, straws, file folders and recycled plastic containers. I was reminded of that Apollo 13 scene where they dump everything on the table to create a solution for the scrubber problem (“Failure is not an option”). After lunch, we trained in suits and rovers while taking our first short EVAs to the Marble Ritual. Everyone was super excited about wearing the suits and being outside. Then we settled down to a wonderful Taco Tuesday dinner with homemade tortillas and space ball taco meat. We created our work plan for tomorrow, then decided to spend the rest of the evening doing COMMS and relaxing. It’s been a wonderful but busy day.

Look Ahead Plan: We will spend the morning in the lab making plates for our halophile experiment. Then part of the crew will go on an EVA to Lith Canyon to collect pothole water samples for analysis and they will also collect samples from a green layer in the stratigraphy here and we will plate them to see what is living there. Finally, a second EVA will go to The Moons to collect gypsum samples to plate.

Anomalies in work: Atila and I needed to go to town for supplies and that set us back a couple of hours so that is why we pushed the plate making back until morning. It’s hard to create a Martian pace with only three days to do so much, but I am trying.

Weather: Sunny and very warm for this time of year

Crew Physical Status: Happy, healthy, some of us are clean, all of us will sleep well.

EVA: Two short training EVAs to the Marble Ritual, XO lead both of them.

Reports to be filed: Sol Summary, Operations Report. GreenHab Report, Operations Report, HSO Beginning of SIM checklist, Bios/Photos, Mission Plan, Journalist Report and Photos.

Support Requested: Teachers need to be added to the eList. We may not be able to send all reports this evening as we don’t know how much internet we used this morning. We have decided to turn off the wifi from 6 am to 7 pm every day as everyone still wants to use their phones for photos and in this way, we won’t have to worry about using the internet.