Astronaut for Hire

MDRS Mission Underway

1/24/2010 08:12:00 PM

My first full day at the Mars Desert Research Station has been very productive. We've completed all safety and engineering checks and conducted our first two EVAs. Donning the spacesuit again felt natural to me. The crew is getting along great, and we're keeping up with all of our duties so far. There are many similarities and differences between MDRS and FMARS. In general, MDRS is more well-worn but also more institutionalized. It has more infrastructure too such as the GreenHab and Musk Observatory. I'll likely devote a future post to comparing the two mock Mars habitats.

As Commander, I'm very busy keeping tabs on everything and reporting back to Mission Support, as well as contributing to the mission itself. Luckily, we have a crew blog where anyone on the crew can post something. In particular, our crew's journalist and geologist Kiri Wagstaff has written some great posts so far. Our crew astronomer Mike Moran is blogging every day too. I strongly encourage you to click on their blog posts to learn what we're doing in our mission. Our daily reports include even more details on our activities.

Sol 0 (Jan 23)	Sol 1 (Jan 24)
Crew Blog Post Mike's Blog Post (part 2) All Daily Reports	Crew Blog Post Mike's Blog Post All Daily Reports EVA 1 slideshow EVA 2 slideshow

I found a way to post GPS tracks and geotagged photos in a more streamlined way than I did at FMARS. EveryTrail seems to be a great way to convey geographic tracks and photos. Below is the GPS photo slideshow of my first MDRS EVA:


MDRS Crew 89 EVA-1

We're all very grateful to Crew 88 and Mission Support for their help in documenting the Hab systems, which have changed quite significantly this year. Our crew hopes to also contribute to the effort of improving MDRS by further documenting its systems, taking detailed inventories, and perhaps clearing out some of the clutter.

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