Day: March 12, 2024

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!

SOL 18: A multi-faceted Crew

“The world speaks many languages.” – The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

When we don’t go out on EVA, like today, the atmosphere always feels more relaxed. Indeed, we usually start EVAs at 9 A.M, which forces us to be very efficient from the start of the day, after the sports session. On the other hand, when there is no EVA planned, we take a little bit more time to do sports, and we are in less of a rush during breakfast. This morning, Leo even took time to cook pancakes for the Crew to start the day well!

Then, each Crew member goes about his or her activities, which can be very different. Today for example, Yves continued working on the 3D photogrammetry map. The end result is not the one we were hoping for: yesterday’s EVA wasn’t useful because the photogrammetry software failed at generating a good 3D map, even though we added new pictures. Our Crew Scientist spent the entire day working meticulously, manually erasing every false point on the map… At the end of the day, his work had paid off: the 3D map was usable, and Lise and Marie could use it to prepare tomorrow’s EVA!

In the morning, I performed an EchoFinder session on our commander Marie. We have some problems with the software that does not enable us to record as many images as we would want, but we are working very hard to solve that. Léa spent the entire Sol on her astronomy project, now that she can make some solar observations. She works on sunspot detection, thanks to a code she developed. Leo, on his side, changed the EVA suits’ dead batteries. He ran some tests to check that the ventilation systems are performing nominally, and that no EVA crewmember will run out of air while out in the Martian desert. In the GreenHab, Mathurin repotted some plants that were too close to each other to grow correctly. He also optimized the remaining space to plant new seeds!

For lunch, we ate a new MELiSSA meal. The objective is to use fresh vegetables in our recipes and to see how much time it costs the Crew. Today, we ate some delicious vegetable gnocchis, made from potatoes and carrots by Yves and Lise. It was delicious, but the Crew agrees on the fact that cooking individual food items like gnocchis is not ideal for time optimization for astronauts on Mars!