Commander
Crew 221, MDRS
Crew 221 Commander Report 7FEB2020
Author: Maria Grulich, Commander
Title: First days
The crew 221 Earth2Mars settled in and started they science projects. The crew did not realize how much also the daily duties of cooking, cleaning and checking on the habitat takes time. Going on EVA starting to become a routine: checking the bags, the radios, comms-check, suiting up the crew members, depressurization and post-EVA and pre-EVA checklists.
Also, the crew cultural nights, sport sessions and meditation sessions coming along, even though we do not manage to do it every evening as it was planned beforehand. We make good progress on our science projects, which works better than expected and the crew’s cooking skills improve every day. The crew is very conservative with water usage, which results that the crew can take a 3min showers every 2-3 days which everyone is excited about. We are all caught up on the several surveys we have to fill and try to keep track of our samples and EVAs even though not all the time the GPS tracker works as expected. The Martian weather is very much in our favour and we hope that it will stay like this.
The first week the focus was put on microbiology and ISRU projects as they need time to develop. The following week will have a focus on the Human Robotic projects and technology demonstrations. Looking forward to more days on Mars.
Commander Grulich
MDRS Station