SOL 25: Happy Birthday Commander!
“He had only one explanation for this fact: things have to be transmitted this way because they were made up from the Pure Life, and this kind of life cannot be captured in pictures or words.” – The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
On this 25th Sol’s morning, our penultimate day of mission, we performed our penultimate EVA! Marie and Léa went to reach checkpoints placed at Kissing Camel Ridge, with Mathurin who counted their steps between each checkpoint. With the 2D map they had yesterday to prepare the EVA, they had more difficulties than Leo and I with the 3D map, because the topography of the area is complex. However, they managed to find 11 out of the 12 checkpoints, but they took almost one additional hour! During this EVA, the EVA Crew was helped by high schoolers from the CNES’s project PROXIMARS. They helped prepare protocols for both before and during the EVA. They even defined the roads to use with the rovers to reach Kissing Camel Ridge! They analyzed maps to report where the 12 checkpoints were and find the optimal path between them. This last photogrammetry’s EVA marks the end of the experiment inside the station. But Yves still has to handle data in order to analyze results.
During the EVA, there was a huge effervescence inside the Hab! Indeed, a surprise was set up: it was the birthday of Marie, our Commander! Leo, Yves, Lise and I stayed at the station, preparing everything for her return! We decorated the Upper Deck with balloons and confetti, and cooked a cake to surprise her. When the EVA Crew came back to the station, we blindfolded Marie to guide her to her surprise. We sang “Happy Birthday” and offered a bouquet of sunflowers from the GreenHab! Balloons and flowers stayed at the Upper Deck, for the great pleasure of the whole Crew! Marie was very moved and happy to celebrate her birthday with the Crew, in the station, in this unique context! For the rest of the Crew, we were delighted to surprise her and to please our Commander!
During the afternoon, we had to get back to work! We don’t have much time left in the station, we want to use it to contribute to science the best we can, by leading to the end of all our experiments. So we had cognitive tests for the Orbital Architecture experiment and session of the TILT experiment, given by the Neuroergonomic department of our school ISAE-SUPAERO. Marie and I performed a session of the EchoFinder experiment, it was the last one of the mission! Ending experiments one by one made us realize that we are leaving tomorrow … but we still have a lot of work to do!