Crew Commander Daily Report
SOL 02
Crew 161
Crew Commander: Divya Shankar
A feel of Sun on Mars waking me up was divine!!!
Morning started with regular engineering checks and a team meeting. Crew Engineer was accompanied with our XO for today’s check. There was confusion if engineering checks should be made with or without suits. We figured out it is required to wear space suit for the checks through the guide book and decided to put them on for the checks which delayed our regular morning meeting a bit. Still made it at the right time for EVA. Myself, Crew Engineer and Crew Biologist headed to dress up for EVA. It was little stressful, as we wanted to make it on time to start EVA as planned. It was a great experience to ride ATV putting on our suits. We had the coordinates and knew the direction but we figured out there was no trail on the path we chose. We headed back and took another path for our destination. Reached the closest point to the destination on ATV and decided to walk a bit to our target. We tried to have continuous communication with HabCom but missed at some points during EVA. HabCom did the time checks and coordinate checks. Since we had broken communication with HabCom we had a very little offset of 50m in the destination we reached. Crew Biologist collected soil samples for her research and we took some photos and headed back to the hab. The entire process was done on time. Came back to the hab and after recompression, HabCom crew welcomed us back and cooked food for us. Later in the afternoon, we made some checklists, Dos and Don’ts for our next EVAs based on today’s experience. Crew Astronomer continued her work with telescope in the observatory after her HabCom operations. Biologist started her work on mixing soil samples and planting sprouts while rest of us started doing the reports and planning next EVA for our research activity.
It was a beautiful productive day!
Regards
Divya Shankar
Commander
MDRS Crew 161