Author: jburk

Crew 206 – 03/12/2019

Sol 16

Authors : Benjamin Auzou, Journalist – Aurélien Murge, Astronomer and Executive Officer

"The force of the experience"

Our Association has been sending crew to the MDRS for five years. MDRS 151,164,175,189,206 are a ‘succession’ of experiences given each year to the new members. 22 French aeronautics and aerospace engineering students from ISAE-SUPAERO have worked to forge our knowledge about Martian simulations. At the beginning two veterans were part of the next crew with a shared leadership. Our crew is commanded by Jérémy, former GreenHab Officer. To continue the partnership with the MDRS and as we had this year in our association more than 30 applications for 2020 missions, the Station Director agreed to receive two French crews.
The whole crew is still undergraduate and next year will be in internship or universities all around the world. Two of us will command these crews but we can’t know yet who it will be. This is why the entire crew is trained to be commander. Everyone is taking in charge some communication windows, leading EVA’s, participating to the writing of the mission report and leading scientific experiments. Moreover, the whole crew is discussing about roles so that each member of the crew is aware of the basic knowledge of every role to be able to train the following crews.
That’s how our crews are based : experience. The members of the crews are selected, formed and advised by members of the previous missions. This allows us to have a good knowledge of the MDRS fundamentals and to deploy scientific experiments over the years. For example the aerosol counter (LOAC) analyzed the air of the desert in 2018 and in 2019 as well as the rover driving experiment ‘TELEOP’. We developed an app to help the leader of an EVA to take notes and follow protocols (created by Louis Mangin, Commander of crew 189 and improved by Gaspard, our crew engineer). And next year we will continue to work on improvement of our monitoring, but also take new experiments to the MDRS with two crews composed of talented and curious students from ISAE-SUPAERO. If you want to follow the preparation of the future missions of our association : call for projects, experiments, presentation of the crews, you can visit our Twitter account : @MDRSSupaeroCrew.

This week we continued to film moments of life and science to prepare the mission video. This video will be ready a few days after the end of the mission. What we are living for three weeks is incredible and the result of our year of preparation, and we are eager to share what we achieved with our relatives and all the people that follow our adventure. Here on Mars, our role is mainly scientific, but back on Earth our role will be more about popularizing our analog mission to children, to our friends, to our families.
These are the two goals of our association, the Club MARS from ISAE-SUPAERO : science for space and link with the public.

Cerise, Crew 206 HSO.

Crew 206 – 03/11/2019

Sol 15

Author : Benjamin Auzou, Journalist

"Trial and Error"

We installed the LOAC back to its location, with the weather station,
and a strongest attach method. The EVA was a remake of the second EVA of
the mission : same team, same goal.
After an afternoon in the Hab, the VR experiment took me to wonderful
landscapes and mountains of China. That was a visual refresh for me !
Today, Aurélien also received his first astronomy results since a few
days thanks to the end of the wind episode : a nice picture of the Pleiads.

This mission confirms that in space, long preparation is needed, but
that it’s impossible to predict all the events. The road to space is
full of difficulties, of obstacles, of errors. And problems are always
easier to solve when they’re detected before leaving the Earth.
We faced issues with the Teleop experiment, which wasn’t lucky at all
this year : a lost (or stolen) eye tracker at the airport, connection
issues on the rover, a broken computer charger. The weather was hard
with our outside experiments (LOAC and Weather station).
We prepared ourselves during one year for this mission but reality is
very different from what we thought. We had to adapt everything in order
to continue the mission and get results for science. We repaired the
weather station to put it back in place, we make changes on protocols to
save the physic version of Teleop. And in the end, no experiment has
been canceled !

The first step on Mars will be the result of years of work of peoples :
researchers, engineers, scientists who dedicated their life to improve
science and technology and help humanity to reach another planet. These
persons are the one that faced fails and that tried the most to make
discoveries, while the rest of the world will only see the final result
and success. Errors are not the end, but more steps to find the truth.