Geologist's Report
Date: April 15, 2015
Crew Geologist's Name: Auriane Canesse
Hello Earth,
Here is a short summary of the progress of our geology experiment. I
will begin by explaining briefly the aim of our study and then I will
describe the results we have got so far.
The goal of our experiment is to map the magnetic susceptibility of
the ground in order to study its variation. The susceptibility varies
with the composition of the soil: it is quite low for sand but very
high for iron or water for example.
Today we wanted to map the surrounding of the hab but since Gaspard's
GPS didn't work we had to take positions by hand with a meter. Since
it was much slower than planed we took only two small sets of
measurements.
For the first one we mapped an area of 25x3m behind the hab. The
buried tank behind the hab appeared very well on the data. Therefore
our instrument could be used to find metallic buried objects. We were
also thinking of using it to find possible water leakage but since the
device measures approximately the first 1.5m of the ground this seems
rather unlikely.
For the second set of measurements we took measurements every 3m on
140m to see if there was a global change. But we only had only
insignificant variations around a constant mean. The magnetic
susceptibility of the ground seems quite uniform. We will try to take
new measurements at a totally new location to see if we measure
different values.
We also discovered that the talkies-walkies disturb the instrument
measurements: since it measures tiny variations of a magnetic field,
the electromagnetic waves (radio frequency) of the talkies are enough
to change completely the measurements. This added another challenge to
our task since we couldn't speak while measuring. This could also be a
great problem for automatic measurements (with the susceptibilimeter
connected to a computer) since then there would be no way to choose to
take the measurements when no one is speaking.