126-CommandersReport
Commander's report
01/26/2015
1 – Tiff's EVA training
2 – Food Pick Up
3 – EVA of the day
4 – Astronomy
5 – PED Experiment
6 – Exercise
7 – Other
Today marks the first full day in sim for 4 of the crew members. We have done so many things
since yesterday that we all are surprised to think that crew 147 only yesterday morning! It
seems to us it was two weeks ago.
Our day planning went a little bit off because the food pick up did not go as planned (see
section 2).
1 – Tiff's EVA training
After waking up with the song “Happy” of Pharell Williams, we started the day with Tiffany's
outstanding training for her upcoming experiment. During multiple EVAs she will be testing how
analog astronauts can work in teams of two to set up geology equipment, without radio
communication. After general explanations, Nuno and Duarte ran the different tests in the
sience lab while Tiffany was supervising, Louise and I were playing the roles of observers, and
Florence, our crew journalist was filming every bit of our actions. This experiment requires
some more training and before practicing it on EVA, we will all run through it at least once.
2 – Food Pick Up
Nuno and Duarte left right after Tiff's training to pick up the remaining food items at the
Bull Mountain Market. Unfortunately, it did not open at 9:00 as we were told yesterday but at
11:00 and when Duarte and Nuno got there at 9:50, they had to wait another hour to get our food
supplies. This disrupted our schedule quite a lot, since we had planned to go on EVA at 11:00,
before lunch.
3 – EVA of the day
Because of this unforseen event, the EVA started at 13:00, after lunch. This was a critical EVA
for our crew because the goal was to survey potential sites for Tiffany and Nuno's experiment.
It lasted a little under 3 hours and the EVA crew members were Tiffany, Nuno, Florence and
Duarte. They had issues at the beginning with two ATVs, which is reported in the engineering
report and EVA report today. But overall mission was successful and they found enough sites for
both experiments.
4 – Astronomy
Our great crew astronomer Louise showed us Jupiter and its moons last night as she was
observing their transits. We also had a wonderful close up on our Moon and some great pictures
were made. More tonight!
5 – PED Experiment
As mentionned yesterday during the comms window, one of our experiment, the UAV experiment, got
cancelled last minute. Therefore, we decided to go more in depth in our project “Perception of
Distances”, which got approved as a pilot study (Perception of Egocentric Distances (PED) in an
analog spacesuit). We would like to do this study on each crew member and treat the project as
a "research hobby" (Shannon mentionned this term during our briefing yesterday). Results won't
be published but just serve Nuno to decide if he wants to go forward with this study or not at
a later time.
We have not heard back on this and would like to know rapidly what we can do, thank you for
advising.
6 – Exercise
We all exercised together today, between 30 min and an hour, after the EVA debrief and before
writing the reports. Our crew engineer Duarte had the wonderful idea to bring a TRX band, which
is a great work out equipment and benefits the whole crew. Additonally we have some DVDs and
half the crew completed the P90X Ab ripper X today.
7 – Other
I alsmost killed my crew with too much jalapenos in the chicken we ate for lunch. Lesson
learned for later! Louise and I baked some bread and muffins during the EVA, so this will be
part of our dinner tonight. We are all very excited!