0331-CommandersReport

Greetings Mission Support,

Commander Report Crew 166:

Mathieu Roiseux

Sol 11

Earth date: 31/03/16

Last night was a really short night for me. The astronomer and I went

to the MUSK observatory from 21:30 to midnight. We tried long pose

measurement of the light coming from Capella and Arcturus. The process

took a lot of time since we were using 100 seconds of exposure time and

tried to make 15 samples to take their average.

Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t perfectly clear and one cloud went

in the observation field of the telescope when we made this extremely

long measurement. Thus it broke all the results. We finally achieved a

long measurement though it seems like we obtained too much noise to

achieve a result which can be really useful.

I woke up at 04:00 am, three hours later than when I fell asleep. I

checked the sky by my window. It was perfectly clear. I went into the

kitchen and saw that the Moon wasn’t really high in the sky. I went

back to bed but could not sleep. At 05:30 the Moon was higher in the

sky and the weather still without clouds. I woke up the astronomer and

we went to the observatory. The dome was really hard to open. The

batteries had no more power. As it was one of our last night we

decided to persevere. We took objects which emit light and placed

them in front of the solar panels. It was long for us but we obtained

enough power to open the upper part of the dome. I think that there may

have a mechanical problem with it because when it was achieved, the

lower part opened without any problem.

It was quite late for astronomers. We started to measure the spectrum

of the light coming from the Moon. And we succeeded! We continued taking

data and as the Moon’s light is much brighter than stars, we were able

to reduce our exposure time to four seconds and take 50 samples to

obtain a valuable average. We finished when the east was taking

beautiful red, gold and blue colors. We waited some minutes to observe

the sunrise. We were so tired that we didn’t wait enough to see the

Sun. Unfortunately for me, the window in my room doesn’t have

something to hide the light rays and I failed to sleep well before the

breakfast.

After it, we went on EVA. We used ATVs and went far away. We stopped

four or five times to let Bertrand take measurements with his

antenna. It was working quite well. Nadine took the go pro with her

but after the first stop, I exchanged my ATV with hers because the

#1 that she was driving had a problem. The left back wheel isn’t moving

normally and she was worried about it. During our stops, I walked a

bit in the areas that we were crossing to obtain additional data for

Arthur’s map. The travel took us more than one hour and half one way.

I decided that we would go back to the HAB before reaching the destination

that we planned. Bertrand took one last normal measure at farthest

crosslink of the roads that we visited.

On the way back to the HAB, we had an idea. The girls traveled on the

road with ATV to the point where they were able to see the HAB.

Bertrand and I went some hundred meters back on our tracks. It wasn’t

really easy to obtain a correct position of everybody but we nearly

succeed. It was difficult for us to receive messages from Arthur and

Gregory who were in the HAB but Julie and Nadine were able to

communicate with both the HAB and us. When it was finished, we traveled

the four at the same time to the HAB.

This afternoon, I tried to sleep a bit but I think that I really need

a full night to rest. As I mainly stayed in my room, I don’t really

know if something special happened during this time.

Tomorrow we plan to go back at the same place as one of us lost

something on the way during EVA. We’d like to recover it before the

wind blows sand on it.

From Crew 166; MDRS Martian Outpost

Crew Commander

Mathieu

Semper Altius