Commander report
01/13/2015
Romain Charles
We started this day with a lot of energy. Our 1st EVA was planned and we
would soon be walking on Mars!
EVA - Rebeca (EVA Leader), Renee, Wissam, Romain
From 10:00am to 11:30am, we prepared our EVA. We checked our radios went
through a quick "voice protocol" training. Then we donned our EVA suits
and egressed the Hab through the airlock
The EVA lasted until 13h and here is a list of the main highlights:
• 2 contingencies with crew members
• 1 contingency with the quadcopter experiment
• Engineering activities
Everybody learned a lot from this experience and, to make sure that no
input would be forgotten, we used our lunchtime together to do a complete
debriefing with several action items for the next EVA leaders to take into
account.
More details from the EVA will be found in the report written by our EVA
Lead, Rebeca.
Water contingency
At 12:35pm we received an emergency message about our water resupply
mission which will be delayed. The trailer tank which left the
surroundings of the Hab was broken en route and needs replacement. At this
time, we don't know how long it will take to replace , so we took the
following actions :
• Evaluate the amount of water still available: ~360l
• Evaluate the water consumption of each activity (Drinking, Toilets,
Bathing, Washing the dishes, Cleaning the Hab)
• Inventory of all plastic cutlery, plates and bags which could be used
instead of normal ones (no more dishes to wash)
• Check the trends of water usage through the previous Engineering reports
With the data gathered, we initiated a "water saving" scenario (no water
for bathing, washing the dishes & cleaning the Hab), which allows us to
last 3 days without any water resupply.
One of the main water consumption left is the use of the toilets. We found
a back-up "Dometic toilet seat" which may allow us to last longer without
any water resupply. However, we didn't find any procedures to set it up
and evaluate its usage so it is not part of our above scenario.
Our Crew Engineer, Rebeca, will have more details in her Engineering report.
If it is confirmed that the Trailer Tank issue is lasting more than 3
days, we would like to propose a possible "water dropping" scenario.
Mission control could drop 350l of water in bottles in the Hab area and
communicate the coordinates of the landed supplies. We would then schedule
a "Water recovery" EVA to bring back the supplies and continue our "water
saving" scenario for the following days.
Currently, we are unaware of existing procedures for water shortages so if
there is another possible scenario, we request the mission support team to
provide them.
Data contingency
The water contingency took priority over the science and, when all the
available actions and scenarios were addressed, we went back to our
experiments. On a routine check of the remaining amount of data available
for our communications, we realized that it was dropping at an alarming
speed. We took a quick action and cut all the internet connections to save
enough data for our nightly communication window. An expected culprit for
this big usage of download is the Astronomy computer which was brought in
today. We'll trouble shoot this issue only tomorrow as we don't want to
exceed our data limit. It was likely due to the automatic updates not
being disabled on the MDRS Astronomy laptop.
Upcoming EVAS
We're requesting approval of an EVA on Jan 14th 2015. Danielle, Andrew
(EVA Lead) and Scott are planning an EVA to test the EVA Planning tool.
I finish this report while our diner is getting ready. Cooking on Mars is
quite challenging with the dehydrated food, now we have a new contrain:
minimum number of dishes and water…
Bacon & pancakes it is!