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!