SOL 19: Martian topography
"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." – The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The photogrammetry EVA of this morning was a huge success! Even though Mathurin and Yves weren’t fully convinced by the 3D map of Candor Chasma generated by photogrammetry, Lise and Marie found all the checkpoints surprisingly quickly: they went through the 12 checkpoints in less than one hour! They identified yesterday the checkpoints thanks to the 3D map, and prepared the path they wanted to follow. It seems like their preparation was efficient! Even though they were fast in finding the checkpoints, the EVA lasted 4 hours because Candor Chasma is located far from the station, and we had to walk a lot to arrive at the searching site. Assisted by Yves during the EVA, Lise and Marie came back to the Hab exhausted by their expedition, but proud of their performance!
This morning during the EVA, Mathurin piloted the drone from the inside of the Science Dome in order to take pictures of a future path we’ll take on an EVA, and to capture images of the station from the sky! For the seven of us, it was strange to see our living place being so little and seeming lost in the huge Martian desert. On his side, Leo, while he was HabCom for the EVA, meaning he was in permanent contact with the EVA Crew, cooked some pancakes for the Crew. We were delighted to eat them as a dessert for lunch!
Like almost every day, various Crew members did cognitive assessments. For the Orbital Architecture experiment, we perform 3 tests per week and per Crew member, in three different places of the station: the Hab, our major living and working place; the GreenHab, a silent place close to nature; and the Science Dome, a more peaceful working place. Today, there were tests in each module! The tasks we must perform are various, but mostly about concentration, working memory and multitasking.
Finally, at the end of the day, Léa and I prepared tomorrow’s EVA. We’ll go to Candor Chasma as well, but we prepared ourselves with a regular 2D map. It will be hard to counteract Lise and Marie’s performance from this morning!