MDRS Sol Summary Report for sol 10

By Michaela Musilova – Crew Commander

Summary Title

French alien invasion and many more laughs

Mission Status:

Even aliens and Martian sickness can’t get us down

Sol Activity Summary:

You know that you have acclimatised to Mars when any change to your daily habit seems to shake the whole crew up. And today we have quite a few “disturbances” to our lives, which the crew is still recovering from now around the dinner table. It all started with an alien invasion. We heard the airlock open downstairs and a few of us ran quickly to close the dreaded airlock – we do not want to lose all our breathable air after all! To our horror, we found a couple of French-speaking aliens in the airlock. Strangely enough, they call themselves the TV crew for the France 2. Luckily, Idriss and I speak French, so we tried to communicate with them peacefully to try to find out what they want. Long story short, they requested to observe our human habits all day today, in return for leaving us alone for the foreseeable future. Thus, not having been left with much of a choice, we accepted them in our Martian colony and had them follow us around all day. The observed and documented everything – from our 3D printing technologies, our plant growing methods, our food cooking and eating. They were particularly preoccupied by my astrobiological experiments, as they were worried I might have sampled some of their cousins endoliths. That is why they were even more keen to follow us on our EVA to make sure we didn’t collect any more of their relatives. They were quite distracted by our EVA suits, which they thought were quite peculiar and did not understand why we wore them in the Martian terrain. After they were reassured we were not doing anything harmful to their motherland, they left us in peace. By that point though, my whole crew was traumatised by the visit. Our little routines and happy snug crew life had been altered dramatically for a whole day. Some started making strange animal noises, others started accidentally putting food into their so-called cancer juice. Roy had comfort himself by doing laundry, while Rick continued to cook more and more food for the crew (some kind of nerve-calming method). To each its own I guess. Now I hear ear-numbing outbursts of laughter from my crew, who is playing a few Jewish memory games.  That should do the trick to put everyone back into their normal habits. Laughter has been our medicine here on Mars and it will be one of the things that I will miss the most upon my return to Earth in a few sols.

Look Ahead Plan:

Since the aliens restricted our plans for today, tomorrow we’re planning on doing a more extensive EVA. I have been doing a number of activities in the Science Dome, which I would like to focus on tomorrow, while also taking care of my students’ spinach growing experiment. Roy and Idriss have now built several Martian bricks and have started to construct the first great wall of Mars. I believe that will take up most of their day tomorrow…

Anomalies in work:

The pump is still leaking significantly. At least Roy found a good use for the water caught in the pipe-leaking-bucket: he did his laundry today 

Weather:

The morning gave us hope that it will be a nice and clear day, but sadly during our EVA we saw a storm on the horizon and we had to return to the Hab.

Crew Physical Status:

Everyone is in great spirits. Some crewmembers have acquired strange Martian habits, which will be difficult to shake off upon their return to Earth, but all is well.

EVA:

We went on a geological/biological exploration EVA through a canyon south of the Hab (UTM Coordinates: Northing : 4248700 Easting :  519500 Zone : 12 S) with the aliens.

Reports to be filed:

Sol 10 summary

Eva report

Eva request

journalist’s report

Operations report

Support Requested:

Water resupply – both tanks on the water trailer have been emptied now into the static tank