SOL 10 : Time flies !
“The boy stayed on until the desert turned pink in the setting sun. He felt the urge to go out into the desert, to see if its silence held the answers to his questions.” – The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
This morning, Léa, Yves and I prepared for our photogrammetry EVA. Last evening, Léa and I took notes using a 3D map generated with images taken by our Parrot drone, in order to find checkpoints in the North Ridge area. Yves, who chose the checkpoint’s locations during a previous EVA, was with us to check that we found them well and took notes about our performances. He was amused to see us searching, as he knew exactly where all the checkpoints were! The EVA went very well, but it was very long! 4 hours of EVA… it was the longest outing we have been on since the beginning of our mission. We were very tired when we came back to the station, because of the itinerary that was hard to follow. As during each EVA, Crew members who stayed in the station were excited for their mates to come back and were informed of what was going on during the EVA thanks to Lise, HabCom for this EVA. When we exited the airlock after re-pressurization, we were warmly welcomed by Marie, Lise, Leo and Mathurin. They had prepared, as usual, some things for us to eat and drink to recharge our batteries quickly! We took time to recount our EVA, and the beauty of the landscapes we saw at North Ridge. Leo and Mathurin already saw them when they went to prepare the maps, but Lise and Marie will discover the red mountains during their own outing, in which they’ll have to find the same checkpoints but with a 2D map!
During our EVA, just before going to North Ridge, we had to stop at our atmospheric instruments’ site, installed at the beginning of our mission, to change their batteries. We noticed a problem in the measurements, that we didn’t understand completely while on site. This afternoon, we organized an emergency EVA for tomorrow, to go and find the problem, and try to solve it. That way, the instruments will continue measuring data!
At the end of the afternoon, we also took time to shoot videos as a Crew. It is unusual for us to be all at the same time in the same module during the day! We all wore our mission’s polos for the videos, which reminded us of the first day of simulation, 10 Sols ago! Time is passing very quickly for us in the station, it is hard for us to imagine That we are already counting with two-digit Sols! Time flies on Mars…