SOL 12: A Sol in March
“How do I guess at the future? Based on the omens of the present. The secret is here in the present. If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And, if you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better.” – The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
This morning, Lise and Marie went out on an EVA to North Ridge, with Mathurin. Their goal was to find checkpoints with the help of a map they drew yesterday, based on a 2D map of the site. Léa was HabCom during the EVA, simultaneously processing some astrophotography taken by the robotic observatory during the night. Listening in with an EVA radio, Léa could know how many checkpoints the girls had found in real time. Léa and I were the 3D map team during the last EVA, so we were carefully following their performance! And we must admit that they did a much better job than us… They found all the checkpoints in record time! They had a lot of fun finding checkpoints chosen by Yves, Mathurin and Leo at the beginning of the week. They came back to the Hab very happy with their performance and with the will to do it again next week. And wouldn’t you know it, the three boys will perform another EVA Monday at Candor Chasma, a different site, and start another iteration of the experiment. This time, Léa and I will have the 2D map and Lise and Marie the 3D one. This will enable us to compare gaps in performance, and to know if they come from the team constitution or from the different maps!
The afternoon was productive for the entire Crew! Yves and Mathurin processed data from the photogrammetry EVA of the morning. Meanwhile, Leo did some video editing for the mid-rotation video. As the name indicates, this video may be posted in the following days, because we are close to the mission’s mid-point! Marie and Léa performed an EchoFinder session. They consolidated what we fixed yesterday, in order to get all the devices connected well together, and so the software could work better. After that, Léa worked on an outreach article about the effect life in space can have on the human body, which she nearly finished! During the afternoon, I was busy sorting the pictures of the EVA, and following each member of the Crew in their activities to take pictures, and to know what they’re doing, so I can account for the day in this report!
Sols are passing quickly, and we are close to the mission’s midpoint. On the one hand, we feel like we have been living in the station for a long time, but on the other hand, time flies, because we’re working on a great many experiments and studies! Today, we also noticed that we spent the first day of March on Mars!