Commander Report
02/03/2015
Lucie Poulet
1 – Base emergency fire
2 – EVA of the day
3 – Backpack#1 issue
4 – Cyano bacteria
5 – Grow tent mounting
6 – Mid mission video
7 – Other
Today was a cloudy day. Luckily no rain but this might ruin our astronomy plans tonight.
1 – Base emergency evacuation
We had a fire level 2 this morning, with Nuno as moderator. After 10 minutes of intense search,
the crew did not manage to locate the fire so we had to evacuate the base. From that moment, it
took us 12 min to suit up, wait 5 min for depressurization, exit the airlock and reach the MAV.
We are making progress on the procedures but also on performing them. I'm very proud of my crew
and happy to be working with such talented individuals.
2 – EVA of the day
Today's EVA was an ATV EVA. We went to site 161 and performed two runs of Tiffany's loss of
coms experiment as well as three runs Nuno's PED study.
3 – Backpack#1 issue
Backpack#1 had an issue on EVA yesterday so we opened it this morning to figure out where the
problem came from. Our EVA specialist Tiffany quickly found out that it was a battery charging
problem: the electrical connection from the charging plug to the battery is disconnected. We
will need to solder it in order to fix it. Request has been made to mission support who
approved it during our EVA so we will proceed with this tonight or tomorrow morning. In the
meantime, we used a spare battery but connections probably went loose during the ATV ride to
the EVA site and the fans did not work.
4 – Cyano bacteria
Radishes grew quite a lot since yesterday. All 10 pots in the cyano treatment have one or two
radishes coming out. 9 of the 10 pots in the control treatment have radishes coming out.
5 – Grow tent mounting
Our crew engineer Duarte has started investigating how to install equipment in the grow tent
(i.e. ducts and fans). Tonight we got Nick Orenstein's instructions to go further with the
mounting and will proceed accordingly.
6 – Mid mission video
Our crew journalist Florence showed us the great video she did for the first week of our
mission. We watched it almost entirely on Sunday night, she finished it on Monday morning and
last night we watched the additional parts. It was awesome! She did an amazing job. Too bad the
file is too bad to be uploaded to youtube from Mars. We tried it last night but after 9 hours
of upload it was only 32% uploaded!
7 – Other
Tiffany made a great chocolat/almond icecream over the weekend that we've been eating since
then. This afternoon, Duarte and Flo baked a very good basil and oregano bread. This morning we
woke up with “Cataloupe Island” by Herbie Hancock, choice of Nuno.
Florence did another video for her web-serie “Comment ça Mars?” and it's awesome and really
funny.