Journalist Report – March 9th

SOL 20: Back to the Canyon

“I’ve crossed these sands many times,” said one of the camel drivers one night. “But the desert is so huge, and the horizons so distant, that they make a person feel small, and as if he should remain silent.” – The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

This morning, Crew 293’s last EVA to Candor Chasma took place! Léa and I had to find 12 checkpoints scattered all along the canyon. We prepared the expedition yesterday thanks to a 2D map and a topographic map. Mathurin was with us during the EVA: his goal was to count our steps, to take notes about our timing and performance. As we were getting closer to the site with the rovers, Mathurin had to stop his rover sooner than Léa and I, because his battery had drained faster than ours, and he would not have been able to come back to the station if he had continued. Léa and I continued driving Opportunity, to get as close as possible to Candor Chasma, and to limit our walking time to the canyon. Of course, we kept Mathurin in our line of sight at all times. Even though we found almost all of the checkpoints in less than an hour and a half, the 3D team was more efficient yesterday… But we are very proud to have managed to get this far, and we performed better than last week at North Ridge! Plus, going to Candor Chasma means enjoying its exceptional geology. Upon arriving at the end of the delimited search area, we were amazed to notice how far the canyon extended. The large rock tours surrounding us made us feel tiny compared to the Martian terrain’s wideness!

Back from the EVA, we were very tired. A 4-hour hike under the Martian Sun, while climbing on rock walls, is exhausting! We were lucky to just have to sit at the table to eat a plateful of good mashed potatoes from MELiSSA that was waiting for us! During lunch, we recounted our EVA to the rest of the Crew, and Crew members who stayed at the station brought us up to speed as well. Yves, who was our HabCom, cooked a brownie for dessert, Leo took care of the GreenHab, and Marie and Lise confronted both the software and hardware problems of the EchoFinder experiment. Everyone was productive during the absence of the EVA Crew!

During the afternoon, after some Crew members rested for a while, everyone followed its planned activities. Léa made impressive solar observations for her astronomy project. Yves and Marie tried once again to make EchoFinder’s equipment work for another session, which wasn’t very successful…

For the past few days, Lise and Leo have been preparing in secret an activity for tomorrow, that they finished today. We can’t wait to see what it is, and to enjoy tomorrow to rest. We need to be in good shape for our last week on Mars!

Journalist Report – March 10th

SOL 21 : A Sunday Quest

“Every search begins with beginner’s luck. And every search ends with the victors being severely tested.” – The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

This third Sunday of the mission wasn’t so ordinary! Of course, we had our normal Sunday activities during the morning, such as a longer sports session and cleaning, but then, we started the game prepared by Lise and Leo!

They had been organizing the game for a week, in secret. The rest of the Crew had no idea of what was going to happen, except for the fact that we would be playing a game collectively. It turned out to be a station-wide treasure hunt! Our mascot had disappeared, and the Crew had to find and save it! We went from hint to hint, from module to module, to answer the riddles and advance on our quest. Lise and Leo had prepared everything , we even had to play games and duel them! On our way, we worked as a team, working to solve the riddles, which were sometimes very complicated, and to find the next hints. The game lasted the whole afternoon, and we all had so much fun! It was a mind-bending and laugh-inducing Sunday, enjoyed by the entire Crew.

Even though, at the end of the day, we came back to more serious considerations. Every evening, we fill out all of our daily questionnaires for various studies. For two weeks, in addition to all questionnaires, we had been interacting with AI4U, an artificial intelligence tool developed by CNES. One by one, we answered questions, testing the accuracy of the vocal reconnaissance software. But this evening was our last session with AI4U!

At the end of this intense day, we are cooking a good meal and preparing for a restful night, to be ready for the last week of our rotation!

Journalist Report – March 11th

SOL 22: Good Vibes Only!

“Don’t forget that everything you deal with is only one thing and nothing else. And don’t forget the language of omens. And, above all, don’t forget to follow your Personal Legend through to its conclusion.” – The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

To start the week on a good note, Yves and Mathurin initiated the last step of the Photogrammetry experiment. During their EVA, they went to Kissing Camel Ridge in order to take pictures of the area and to generate 2D and 3D maps of it. Twice we explored the northern part of the station’s surroundings, but this time, we turned right after leaving campus, taking the southbound road! It enabled us to discover new Martian landscapes… During this EVA, Yves and Mathurin needed to be with another Crew member. This time it was Lise, instead of Leo the two previous weeks. Lise, who had loved searching for the checkpoints in the previous destinations, was on the other side of the experiment this time, and she loved it all the same! Her goal, with Yves, was to find where to put the checkpoints while Mathurin was taking the hundreds of drone pictures. During the week, there will be new exploration teams with the 2D or 3D map. This is the last iteration of an experiment we all very much enjoyed participating in!

Meanwhile, Léa and Marie wrote some new outreach articles for our website, and every Crew member who wasn’t out on EVA was busy accomplishing their planned tasks, from experimental data handling to cognitive assessments in the Hab or GreenHab.

The MELiSSA activity, prompting us to cook meals with fresh vegetables and not only dehydrated food, continues to delight the Crew! Today for example, Léa and I cooked a very tasty carrot cake for lunch. Crew members who were out on EVA enjoyed this great meal after being out for a few hours. Then, in the early afternoon, Lise and Mathurin tried to solve problems they had in their code for retrieving data from our smart watches and impedance meter. They put in common everything they had done on their own. At the end of the afternoon, we all enjoyed a virtual reality experience: in this personalized video for each of us, we were surprised to see Arnaud Prost, a French astronaut, wishing us good luck and giving us advice for the end of our mission! This video cheered everyone up, and gave us that final bit of motivation we needed, to end all of our studies and experiments in a grand finale!

Journalist Report – March 6th

SOL 17: Here comes the Sun!

“Then I am happy. And there is sweetness in the laughter of all the stars.” – The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The rescheduled EVA disrupted our routine today. Indeed, we are used to performing EVAs in the morning. But today, to solve 3D map’s errors and do photogrammetry again to Candor Chasma, Yves, Mathurin, and Leo chose to go out when the Sun was at its highest point, to avoid having too much shadow in the drone’s pictures. The EVA was performed between 10 A.M and 2 P.M. The Crew was warmer than usual in their suits! However, they think that they will be able to generate a better 3D map than the previous one, thanks to the strategy they followed on site. Yves started to sort the pictures this afternoon, trying to keep some pictures from the previous EVA. He will let the software process the new photos, and we will use the new 3D map tomorrow to prepare the next EVA!

During the EVA, Léa, Marie, Lise and I stayed inside the station. We were very efficient too! While I was in contact (as HabCom) with Yves, the EVA Leader, Lise improved the code to read our Core Data sets, recorded by the impedance meter every morning. Her objective is to make the code as robust as possible, to enable future crews to use it as well, and compare our data to theirs. Meanwhile, Marie worked on AMI’s deployment, now mostly operational. We now have the final version of the software, enabling us to simulate the station’s power management and to simulate sensor anomalies that we need to check in the modules placed in “warning” mode. These anomalies can get worse and become an emergency, forcing us to apply an emergency EVA protocol. The last good news of the day concerns Léa, our Crew astronomer. Deprived of the Solar Observatory since the beginning of the mission because of a malfunction, it was fixed this morning, so she could perform her first solar observations! She was very happy, but she could only observe our star for a few hours this morning, because of the afternoon’s cloud coverage… The Crew hopes for the Martian weather to be merciful so she can continue her astronomy project, focusing on sunspot detection, and on evaluating their speed and direction.

For lunch, we cooked carbonara pasta. Thinking about it, we didn’t use all the carbonara pastas’ ingredients. No bacon, no “crème fraiche”. Indeed, we don’t have all these ingredients in our dehydrated food, but we found a great alternative that we use in a lot of our meals… Bechamel! We became professionals of the recipe with dehydrated food! It is always delicious, but we are starting to miss earthly food, we all dream of eating good ‘Schokobons’!

Journalist Report – March 7th

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!

Journalist Report – March 8th

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!

Journalist Report – March 3rd

SOL 14: The White Planet

“It was the pure Language of the World. It required no explanation, just as the universe needs none as it travels through endless time.” – The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

For this second Sunday on Mars, the Crew woke up seeing a red and white landscape! After yesterday’s wind gusts, snow happened and covered the Martian hills in front of our windows. But the wind, which kept blowing during the day, and the sun, hiding behind the clouds, threw away the white snowflakes…

We followed our Sunday routine. We started with a big sports session, which lasted more than an hour. Lise prepared an original session: we were switching between individual exercises and group ones. After going through seven individual exercises, we gathered to complete a common work out. We did this 4 times, and then finished with a challenge: holding as long as possible the plank position! After that, we were exhausted, but happy to have worked out. Then, we enjoyed bread, cooked by Léa the day before. After this big breakfast, we kept performing our Sunday activities: a big clean up of the station! We had to clean all the Martian dust we brought from the outside during EVAs. Despite it, we spent time working. For example, Lise and I performed cognitive assessments for the Orbital Architecture experiment.

The afternoon was busy with an activity that brought happiness to the Crew: washing our hair! Just before that, Lise, who found her hair too long, asked Marie to cut it, and we did it! Then, those who wanted to wash their hair, and couldn’t do it since the beginning of the mission, could finally do it. It was great! We are proud to have used only 9 liters of water to Lise’s, Marie’s and Léa’s hair, as well as mine. On his side, Yves went for dry shampoo. It was not easy to wash our hair while kneeling down on the ground, with the head inside a bucket, clearing our hair with water from a water flask! But we had a lot of amusement helping each other out, which created a joyful atmosphere in the whole station!

Finally, the Crew enjoyed muffins, cooked by Mathurin. This day enabled everyone to rest and prepare themselves for next week!

Journalist Report – March 4th

SOL 15: Who runs Candor Chasma? Boys!

“He was learning a lot of new things. Some of them were things that he had already experienced, and weren’t really new, but that he had never perceived before.” – The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

We thought we had known Martian snow, but Mars caught us by surprise. Unlike yesterday, when only a few snowflakes were sprinkled on the red hills, the beautiful landscape in front of our windows was entirely white! But this weather was worrying to us. Indeed, a photogrammetry EVA was planned to Candor Chasma, located a bit far from the station. But, seeing the weather conditions, it was impossible for the EVA Crew to accomplish this mission: the landscapes looked too different under snow for photogrammetry to be effective, and the conditions could be dangerous. So, after coordinating together, we decided to wait for the afternoon to perform the EVA, hoping the snow would have melted under the sun. We weren’t sure if it would get better …

In the end, this development drastically impacted our schedule! We reorganized our morning, to perform in the morning activities originally planned in the afternoon. Marie tried to troubleshoot some software we use for the experiments, as well as Mathurin. Lise and Yves continued programming to collect the impedance meter’s data. During this time, Léa wrote some outreach articles for our Web site. With the cold being so persistent in the past two days, we were worried the battery used to power the atmospheric instruments had discharged too quickly. Leo, our Crew engineer, had a great idea: building an isolating box, in which we could put the batteries, so we wouldn’t have the same problem again! He spent the morning tinkering thanks to all the equipment from the RAM.

At one PM, the weather had improved, and the snow had melted. We were given the go ahead from Mission Support! So, Mathurin, Yves et Leo could go out on EVA with the drone, to take pictures of Candor Chasma, which will then enable them to generate 2D and 3D maps of the site for the photogrammetry experiment! Like last week, photogrammetry’s teams were made in the same way, so the girls stayed in the Hab today, while the boys were alone on Mars! In addition to that, the mid-mission resupply cargo had landed a few meters away from the Hab. So, at the beginning of their EVA, the team put the resupply in the main airlock. From the inside of the station, Lise, Marie, Léa and I re-pressurized the airlock and then removed the resupply for the next two weeks from it. It was pleasant and reassuring to see our kitchen cabinet full again! While we were putting everything away, the EVA Crew went to the atmospheric instrument’s site to deploy the instruments once again we brought back to the station during the previous EVA. The snow of the past two days proved to us we had made the right decision! After that, Mathurin, Leo and Yves went back to the rovers to go achieve their main EVA’s goal: Candor Chasma! Once they arrived there, they could launch the drone and take pictures to perform photogrammetry of the area. Lise was HabCom during their EVA. While she was following their actions, she Processed the water consumption data, collected over the past two weeks by carefully making note of the quantities and uses of water, every time someone opened the tap.. Therefore, in the last two week and considering every category of water usage, we used 5 liters of water per Crew member per day! We are proud to succeed at Conserving this precious resource, which made us realize how much water we use on Earth.

Coming back from Candor Chasma, everyone got back to work. Having an EVA during the afternoon was unusual, and completely changed the shape of our Sol!

Journalist Report – March 5th

SOL 16: Sometimes you need to know how to start again…

“Actually, it wasn’t that those things, in themselves, revealed anything at all; it was just that people, looking at what was occurring around them, could find a means of penetration to the Soul of the World.” – The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

The morning was very busy for the Crew! We performed various cognitive assessments, in different modules, for the Orbital Architecture experiment. The aim is to study our performances in different places of the station. For this experiment, we are also wearing different sensors. For example, one of them indicates our location thanks to anchors that Lise placed everywhere in the station at the beginning of the mission. We need to turn them on in the morning and save data at the end of the day. We also have a Polar Band, placed around our chests, with a cardiac sensor. We wear it during the day, and Crew members that aren’t bothered by it keep wearing it during the night. All data will be collected by a researcher coming from KTH University leading the experiment. Finally, we also wear smart watches. They collect a large amount of data, especially about our sleep. At first, it was a bit tricky to get used to all these devices. After 16 Sols, we don’t feel them anymore. All these sensors are not that stringent for us, especially because we know that the scientific data will be used for interesting research!

Léa, our Crew astronomer, received this morning the pictures she took during the night thanks to the robotic Observatory. It is the first time since the beginning of the mission that she’s satisfied with her pictures. It is not that easy to do astrophotography! She processed data and obtained a beautiful picture of the M-42 nebula! Now that she understands better how it works, she’s hoping for other pictures to show us!

Today, we had a setback for our photogrammetry experiment. Let’s resume the events. We performed the experiment at North Ridge last week, to compare the performances of two teams: one with a 3D map generated thanks to the drone’s pictures, the other with a classic 2D map. The photogrammetry at North Ridge was a success, and we wanted to do it again this week in a second site called Candor Chasma. Thus, Yves, Mathurin and Leo went there to take drone’s pictures yesterday. They thought that the more they take photos, the more precise the 3D map will be. It is why they took 1400 pictures yesterday, versus 650 pictures last week. Even though they were happy about their photogrammetry, they were worried about the fact that the map could be more complicated to generate. How to explain? In the middle of the scarlet desert, stands North Ridge, chiselled by the wind, draped in the usual Martian red but also yellow, green, and white. Although massive in size, North Ridge is not as intimidating as mountains on Earth can be. By its gentle slopes and round shapes, North Ridge is an invitation to climb, guided by the colour gradients of its flanks. Filled with cracks and canyons, with a good visibility everywhere, it was the perfect place for photogrammetry. Candor Chasma, on the other hand, is a scar fracturing the ground. As deep as North Ridge is high, the canyon surrounds you with its sinuous walls, pierced from all sides, like a river joined by its affluents. Angles and sharp turns make for a reduced visibility, making it not a perfect place for photogrammetry. And after 11 hours of the computer processing pictures, the software gave us a map that was not satisfying us… Some points were not located at the right place, which distorted the map. Yves and Mathurin immediately thought of starting again the process by going back to Candor Chasma and tried to organize an EVA for this afternoon! This would have enabled us to not completely change our EVA planning, but this demand wasn’t accepted by Mission Support. We rescheduled the future EVA so Leo, Yves and Mathurin could go to Candor Chasma with the drone tomorrow. It was the first time that rescheduling had a direct impact on the end of our mission, which made us realize that we’ll have to leave the station in a few days… Yves and Mathurin then spent their afternoon trying to understand how to improve their photogrammetry for tomorrow, so they won’t encounter the same problems anymore. Indeed, it is a complex subject and nobody in the Crew is an expert on it. They read documentation and made some hypotheses about the map’s errors. They have developed a new strategy thanks to these conclusions. Tomorrow, Mathurin will pilot the drone. Yves and Leo will follow the drone and guide Mathurin to better cover the area. That way, Mathurin will be able to focus only on the photos and we hope the map will be better!

Despite this event, which mobilized a lot of our Crew’s grey matter, the afternoon was calm. For example, Léa carried on working on the 3D printer, to try and make it work, while Leo and I were playing chess!

Journalist Report – March 2nd

SOL 13: Winds in the East, Mist coming in

“So, once again, the world had demonstrated its many languages: the desert only moments ago had been endless and free, and now it was an impenetrable wall.” – The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

When we woke up, the Crew heard loud wind gusts against the Hab’s walls. But we were not surprised: we were advised yesterday that today’s weather wouldn’t be nice. This is why we rescheduled the EVA to the morning, even though it was initially planned for the afternoon. Originally, this EVA was designed to be an easy EVA, just to change batteries of the atmospheric instruments. But, with the wind speed and the rain announced, we had no other choice than to retrieve some instruments in the station, and protect others from the wind. LOAC was loaded in the back of Curiosity rover, brought back to the station, and the Field Mill packed with foams and duct tape in case the mast tips over and breaks because of the wind gusts. We heard the wind blowing harder and harder throughout the day, and we were glad to know the atmospheric instruments were safe.

Winds didn’t stop blowing all day, wind gusts even blew open and nearly broke our principal airlock’s door. Once the problem was solved, winds damaged a part of the connecting tunnels which enable us to go from one module to another. We evacuated the Science Dome right before the tunnels became dangerous to move through, and decided to close it off for the time being. While the Crew was working in the Hab in the afternoon, we were glad to be comfortable inside the station, instead of outside on an EVA as initially planned!

We had some other little issues during the morning, especially with the experiments led by high school students. The plants we were growing with them were nearly dead… But we found solutions to still have data for this experiment! Léa also tried all morning to fix the 3D printer, which could be useful for plenty of applications. She has been working on it for various Sols, dealing with each problem, one after the other. Today, she found some solutions, but she thinks it will be complicated to make it work…

For lunch, we wanted to innovate for our dehydrated meals by cooking a quiche, with homemade dough. We were afraid to leave the table still hungry, so we made a large quantity of it. A very large quantity! We were unable to finish it entirely, and nobody felt hungry all afternoon!

Just before the meal, Leo showed us the mid-rotation video, which he finished editing earlier. We were all very happy to see a summary of the first half of our mission. Indeed, today, Sol 13, marks the halfway point of our mission on Mars! We can say that this mid-mission Sol was memorable and quite eventful for the Crew!

Copyright © The Mars Society. All rights reserved. | Main Site