0124-JournalistReport

Crew 162 Journalist Report Sol 01

January 24, 2016

Carmen Felix

Today is our fist full day at the hab and we are officially starting our

simulation. We all woke up really early, around 5a.m. as the Crew 161

needed to prepare to leave the hab. We help them to pack and prepare

breakfast for them, so they could leave around 7:30a.m. Crew 161 was

really nice with us and gave us a full hab training yesterday.

We decided to start our morning slow, by having breakfast before

unpacking and setting up our rooms. The rooms are tiny, but comfortable,

and we manage to fit everything we need inside. Around 10 a.m. we had

our first planning meeting (while enjoying a good coffee) and we went

through today’s activities, priorities and schedule. We assign some

chores to each of us and divided tasks like blogging. We share all the

important docs and information we all need to have, and made sure we

were all on the same page.

My first task after the meeting was going through all the kitchen

counters and organizing our food options, and dishes. As I am on a

gluten free diet, I also needed to understand what I can eat and which

things are better for me to avoid. It was good to go through everything

and get rid of whatever was not useful anymore like empty boxes (some of

them we kept them) and condensing others.

After this, we got hungry and ate a little bit of canned turkey

(leftovers from last crew), pink lemonade and some cookies. I cleaned

the dishes paying attention to not waste much water, which is something

really important when you are on Mars, as water is a limited resource.

Around 3pm we started getting ready to suit up for our official

headshots and team pictures which we took outside the hab. We will use

these pictures in our website and other social media. The view of ‘Mars’

is awesome out here and we really enjoyed it. As soon as we finished

with that, we helped our crew engineer Anderson to plump the water from

the trailer tank into the container tank, which was quite important. We

needed to wait until the afternoon to do this because in the morning the

water was frozen, according to the engineering morning checks.

We started simulation officially today around 5:30p.m, and we record a

small video while closing the hatch for the documentary I will be

working on during my stay. To celebrate the start of our simulation,

Renee prepared us banana ice cream!

After this, we sit down to work on our reports, emails and social media.

We are getting ready to have dinner together and relax!