327-JournalistsReport

03/27/2015

Journalist Report

Mohammad IRANMANESH

As Victor Hugo once said: "Melancholy Is the Pleasure of Being Sad".

That's probably what crew 151 feels today.

We are sad to leave this Mars Analog Mission, to leave OUR Mars.

You could think that our sadness comes from the fact that countrary to previous days the afternoon was spent cleaning the HAB instead of preparing the next EVA, but no, the reason was much deeper than that.

We can't believe that it has already been two weeks that we are in simulation and that soon we will have to leave this place. The city noises and its poluted sky will have a hard time making us forget Mars.

But we know that this is the good kind of sadness that we feel, the happy kind. We had an amazing experience and we managed to do so much more than we expected. Against all odds, our small crew of 4 (that later became even smaller), did a great job accomplishing the daily tasks at the hab and reaching the scientific goals set for this mission.

These results are probably due to the fact that we managed to adapt ourselves on the fly to new situations and calmly worked as a team towards finding a solution for each problem we encountered.

For me, these two weeks reinforced my belief concerning the importance of Humans in space exploration and the advantages of Astronauts over robots in the race to Mars. I highly doubt that robots would have made a crew as awesome as crew 151!

Dear Mars, It's a happy kind of sadness when I think of you!

Hope to land on you soon.

Crew 151!