Daily Summary
By: Saroj Kumar (Executive Officer and Crew Scientist)
Sol-05
Earth Date: 02.03.2017
Finally, after few delays due to unavoidable reasons our commander had joined the mission. The crew was all pumped and was looking for a wonderful and a busy day with many activities. With most the schedule decided an evening before the crew was ready for the first morning briefing with the commander at 7:30 AM. Today’s schedule was completely packed with many activities such as collecting soil samples to characterize the transference of human commensal bacteria around the hab, monitoring of fenugreek plants in the greenhab, geological study on sample ‘Mars rocks’ collected during previous EVA’s, repairing of overhead water pump and finally ‘Team Planeteers’ official group photos. With lots to work on in the next couple of hours the team needed a perfect breakfast. We had cereals with powdered milk and a ‘Kadak Chai’ (Strong Tea). The team also had delicious ‘Gulab Jamun’ (Indian desert food) prepared by Sneha as a mark of celebration on our commander’s arrival.
Soon after the breakfast the team had planned to take official group pictures and believe me after all the permutations and combinations of the crew members for a perfect group photo, the complete session turned out to be more tiresome than all of my previous EVA’s. We do believe it’s equally important to share our work via pictures and reports so that we can ignite the spark of human space exploration among young minds. We soon started working on our respective tasks after the group photo and had short lunch. Sai Arun was trying to study the rock compositions and its formation from the samples collected during previous EVA’s. Sneha is continuously monitoring her fenugreek plants in greenhab and misian Mars lamp. We all are very excited to see the plant growth and just can’t wait to have fresh fenugreek and potato curry sometime soon 🙂
Our today’s EVA was one of the most technically challenging, we had to make sure we do not contaminate the soil samples by directly exposing ourselves into it and still collect the samples by only scratching the ‘Mars’ surface. In every EVA we try to study the challenges faced and make sure we do not to do any mistake where we would die on a real harsh Martian environment. In spite of all the difficulties faced during the EVA, I believe we finally did not do anything which would be catastrophic on a real mission and completed the EVA successfully. Finally, our last task for the day was to repair the overhead water pump.
Ad Astra !!