Walden5

Sorry for the lack of posting - we had a serious network slowdown recently. We connect to the internet via satellite and it seems that we exceeded our allotted bandwidth (AKA Fair Access Policy Threshold, gotta love HughesNet for convoluted terminology). Anyway, after a couple of days of curtailed internet usage we seem to be back online. Most of us here are internet junkies and while the recent outage was exasperating, to a certain degree it did enhance our simulation. Actual communication between Mars and Earth would take up to 40 minutes to transmit a message and reply. Our internet outage along with the rationing of water and the several power outages we experience each day have definitely heightened our awareness and appreciation of the basic utilities humans require to function.

Snow on Mars: photo by Debi-Lee Wilkinson

The other big news is that it snows on Mars! Well at least it snows on analog Mars. Our landscape has taken on a distinctly lunar appearance. There has been some debate amongst the crew, but given the white and rocky terrain, consensus is that that we’ve been beamed from Mars to Ganymede (a moon of Jupiter). It’s quite beautiful outside.

Suiting up for EVA: photo by Mike Smithwick

Backing up a couple of days, Graham and I enjoyed our crew’s first simulated EVA (or extra-vehicular activity). In addition to familiarizing ourselves with the spacesuit simulators, we had a small ISRU (In-Situ Resource Utilization) mission to collect, as our commander Deb-Lee described it, “local material to enhance activity in our compost bin”. This was a enigmatic way of describing cow dung! We had a fun 2 hour ride on the ATVs and collected a whole trash bag full of “local material”.

In-Situ Resource Utilization: Morgan collects cow dung.

ISRU is actually a very compelling and elegant idea. Basically it describes the approach of using indigenous resources found and/or fabricated on the Moon, Mars, etc. to reduce the amount of material that must be brought from earth. ISRU has been popularized by space visionaries like Robert Zubrin as economical ways of buiding human colonies on Mars. But the terms “indigenous” and “colonize” are definitely trigger terms for me and suggest a myriad of philosophical and ethical issues to grapple with. I plan on dedicating some future posts to explore controversies and ethical dilemmas that ISRU and terraforming (ISRU’s logical endpoint) suggest. Astrobiology Magazine has a great series on their website that explore the “Great Terraforming Debate”.

Back to life at the Hab - our focus on engineering tasks during the first few days here has paid off and now that we’ve entered Sim, the crew has fallen into a nice rhythm. We still have a number of daily chores that in theory could be automated but, due to cold weather conditions and broken pumps, require our regular attention. These primarily involve moving water into and out of the Hab. Even with a crew of 6, it takes a remarkable amount of time each day just to keep us all fed, clean and the basic systems running. Someone mentioned the other day that during a period when the space shuttle was grounded and there was only a skeleton crew on the International Space Station, it took two astronauts working around the clock just to keep the thing functioning - never mind conducting any scientific research.

We’ve worked up a daily rotating schedule for cooking, cleaning, generator refueling and water pumping. In between these duties, crew members are beginning to squeeze in work on their own research projects. Yesterday we left the Hab on our first all-crew EVA to work on Chris Oravetz’s Slope Estimation research project. The idea behind his research is to develop an understanding of the psychological and physiological factors that influence an astronaut’s ability to accurately estimate the slope of surrounding terrain. He has a series of experiments for which the rest of the crew will act as test subjects. In addition to collecting some initial data, we played in the snow!!

Slope estimation experiment

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