David D. Levine

I'm back from Mars, but my head's still in a strange space. This will probably continue for some time.

I've been spending some of my time doing catchup chores, like clearing out my spam traps (I have five, for my various accounts) and unpacking and doing laundry. Most of the rest of yesterday was spent working on a Keynote presentation (Apple's answer to PowerPoint) of my Mars mission. It's going to be mostly photos. I have 2500+ photographs to sort through and in two passes I got them down to the 1000 best and then the 400 best. I really need a 100 best and 30 best for various purposes. And that's not to mention the videos.

Most other daily stuff isn't happening yet. I need to take the car to the shop (battery died while I was gone) and vote (deadline is today) and answer some important paper mail and clean the kitchen and stuff like that there, but it's hard to concentrate on Earthly life.

The new MDRS crew is going great guns, fixing the shower and water heater and fourth rover which have been out of commission for a long time, putting up GPS tracks on Google Earth with their heart rates and everything, and finishing the erection of the radiotelescope. I am so proud of them! You can see their group blog at http://www.wkiri.com/mdrs_crew89/.

I posted photos every day during my trip to Mars, but for technical reasons I could only post them to LiveJournal rather than here. Here's a link to all of my photo posts on LJ (about 6 photos per post). Enjoy!

MDRS-88 sol 1 photos
MDRS-88 sol 2 photos
MDRS-88 sol 3 photos
MDRS-88 sol 4 photos
MDRS-88 sol 5 photos
MDRS-88 sol 6 photos
MDRS-88 sol 7 photos
MDRS-88 sol 8 photos
MDRS-88 sol 9 photos
MDRS-88 sol 10 photos
MDRS-88 sol 11 photos
MDRS-88 sol 12 photos
MDRS-88 sol 13 photos
MDRS-88 sol 14 photos
MDRS-88 sol 15 photos

The day dawned clear and cold, with most of the snow melted and the ground mostly frozen rather than muddy. By noon it was about half dry, squidgy in a few places but no impediment to travel at all.

Spent the morning packing, taking a last few pictures and videos, and doing a few bits of paperwork, but mostly just waiting for Crew 89 to show up. I put on my space suit for the last time, to get a video of the process; I walked up to the Musk Observatory for the last time, to get one more set of photos of the splendid view; I walked around and got a few pictures of things that had come to be important for me without ever being photogenic, like the Engineering shed. I said a fond goodbye to my radios, my faithful rovers, my trusted backpacks -- even cantankerous #4. I gave Laksen a signed copy of Space Magic. I must confess I got a little teary-eyed.

Crew 89 was about an hour late, which made us even more pleased to see them when they finally showed up. Even better, they came in a huge 4x4 that would easily handle any rough roads and could accommodate all our luggage. They came in with a huge load of food, including many things that had run out early in our mission or even before we arrived. Lucky bastards!

We spent about three hours in hand-over meetings, walking them through the hab's systems and answering questions. Having written the Quick Guides, I could answer questions about areas I never even handled. They seem like a smart bunch, but so naive in the ways of Mars. They intend to do jazzercise every day and have a clever plan to get showers which seemed horribly overambitious to us, but hey, if they can make it work, more power to them.

After the traditional group photos on the front porch, we drove off, leaving the starry-eyed young'uns to make their way on Mars. They have an exciting and challenging two weeks ahead of them, but I'm sure they'll find their way just as we did, and in two weeks they will be the old hands, doing the same for Crew 90.

In any endeavour, from running for the bus to serving a tour of duty, one naturally paces oneself, conserving energy and attention to last as long as necessary. If this were a three-week mission I'm sure I would be much more ready to go on at the end of two weeks than I am right now, but as it stands I am completely spent and more than ready to go home. I am so very glad we didn't have to spend even one additional night at the hab.

We had a little excitement not long after departing the hab, about which I'll say no more. Then we got a panicked phone message from the commander of Crew 89, saying that a jacket and wallet had been left in our car and he was running after us in New Blue. We were not pleased at the delay, but it would have been churlish to keep driving, so we waited by the side of the road for about half an hour until he caught up and got the missing jacket (the wallet was not in the car; I hope it turns up). If we'd been able to call him back, though, I think we might very well have left the jacket hanging on the milepost 152 sign and kept going. Do not get between the outgoing crew and their showers.

Once we made it out to where I had proper cell phone service I checked the hab webcams on my iPhone. The new kids seemed to be settling in nicely, but there was a weird moment when one minute they were all at the table and the next they were all gone; a few minutes later they'd returned. A sudden crisis, or did they all just go out to look at the stars? We may never know. It's very weird looking at the MDRS webcam and seeing other people in "our" hab. Imagine seeing live video of your own kitchen with a different family in it! Surprisingly addictive to watch.

After a stop at Wal-Mart to return a few unused items and buy some souvenirs, we had one last dinner together -- real meat, and non-dehydrated vegetables, and soda pop, and wine, and all the water we wanted, just for the asking. Heaven. Bianca had to go back after visiting the loo because she realized only after leaving the bathroom that she could flush the toilet. I washed my hands in warm water for the first time in two weeks, and also saw myself in the mirror for the first time in two weeks (I caught a lot of sun, apparently, because those spots aren't washing off). We reminisced and cracked in-jokes at the expense of the new crew and generally acted like crazed prospectors just returned to town.

Then the hotel -- just a Best Western, but oh so luxurious with its soft soft beds and clean white sheets and acres, just acres of space. Waiting for me at the front desk was a surprise package from kateyule: gingerbread astronauts (with red sugar Mars dust on their boots) and computers and space shuttles and stars and red-frosted planets Mars. I love my sweetie so much. We shared the cookies all around, hugged and shook hands and promised to stay in touch, and I cried a little again. Might see some of them tomorrow at the airport, but we have to assume this is our final goodbye.

Finally, after settling into the room, dealing with some email questions from the new crew, and a long phone call to Kate, came the eagerly-awaited moment: a long, long hot shower, with real soap and everything. I washed my hair three times and scrubbed myself all over with a washcloth until I felt actually clean. I stayed in there until my fingers were all wrinkled. And I flushed the toilet too, just because I could.

And now to sleep, in my soft warm luxurious motel bed. Tomorrow I return to Portland and my beloved and much-missed snookie.

This is David D. Levine, Space Cadet For Mars, signing off!

P.S. You can track Crew 89's progress on their group blog at http://www.wkiri.com/mdrs_crew89/ (kirimars on LJ).

Spent a big chunk of last night with Paul, sitting around a bucket of water in the lab cleaning mud off our boots with a toilet brush and talking about how to become a for-real astronaut. Just about everyone here but me has taken serious steps toward becoming an astronaut, and it sounds like it's even harder than getting a novel published. They have so many applicants and the requirements are so stringent that the tiniest problem -- or no probem at all -- can knock you out of consideration. In fact, it might just be that the easiest route to becoming an astronaut is to become a US Senator, like John Glenn. That's a position you can obtain with no qualifications but a substantial bank account.

Internet is back up and running at full speed today, thank goodness. It went down again this morning, and I volunteered to go out and clean the dish, but while I was putting my boots on it came back up by itself. Apparently I have become so mighty an engineer that just the threat of a visit from me is enough to make balky equipment cooperate.

On the flip side of that equation, backpack #4 -- the one that wasn't working when we arrived, and whose battery I replaced -- never did charge all the way up and Mission Support recommended I try completely discharging it and charging it for 24 hours. I did so yesterday... and it reacted to this treatment by dying altogether. I was extremely annoyed to be leaving the next crew with a dead pack, after managing to keep all six running for my whole rotation. But after another 12 hours it seems to have mostly recovered: the light is yellow rather than green, and it doesn't blow air quite as forcefully as the others, but it's at least usable. Given another 24 hours of charging it might even be all the way up to 100%.

We had more snow overnight. Bianca and Diego went out for an EVA in the snow but Laksen and I were more cautious; we stayed inside and worked on the Engineering Rounds Quick Guide. This completes the series of Quick Guides -- the planned Power Systems Quick Guide could not be completed because we haven't seen DG this week. I also wrote up an email detailing the problems we've had with our Internet connection this week, with lessons learned and open questions, and mailed it to Mission Support. I hope future crews will find these documents useful.

With the snow and mud, I'm concerned about the next crew making it up Cow Dung Road (really no more than a trail) from the highway to the hab, but if they get the 4WD vehicle from the rental agency as they are supposed to (we didn't) they should be okay. It's been clear and cold all day here, but there are threatening clouds on the horizon and at the moment the wind is blowing so hard we can feel the whole hab shake. Every once in a while there's a frightening crash as ice comes cascading down from the hab roof.

This week has been a real lesson in You Don't Know What You've Got Till It's Gone. We had such gorgeous weather for the first week and a half and we didn't think it would ever change, but since Wednesday it's been completely different -- much harder to work in and much less conducive to beautiful "Marsy" photographs. I'm glad we made good use of it while we had it, and I hope it clears up soon for Crew 89. The same goes for fast and reliable Internet, come to think of it.

We spent the middle of the day cleaning up the hab, the major part of which was sweeping and vacuuming up the dust that has gotten everywhere since the last cleaning. We also organized the tool benches in Engineering and the EVA room, and cleared off the counters in the lab... yesterday those were valuable geological samples, but today they're just rocks. When Diego asked what he should do with his unneeded samples, I said "Throw 'em out the airlock!" I have never before had the opportunity to say that for real. Bianca even cleaned up the muddy rovers. When we were done the place looked fabulous. Oh, it's not spotless -- this place will never be really clean -- but it's much cleaner than it was, and we think even cleaner than it was when we first arrived.

In the afternoon, we laid various contingency plans to make sure Crew 89 actually makes it out here to relieve us despite the snow and mud. We have a powerful four-wheel-drive vehicle, New Blue (I referred to it as V'ger earlier but V'ger was replaced by this better vehicle), which we can use to drive out to the main road and pick them up if the car they get from the rental agency isn't up to the task. We also made a large sign saying <– HAB so they won't miss the turn-off we missed when we came in. We are in email communication with the new crew and we'll make final plans before they leave the hotel tomorrow morning.

Dinner tonight was a repeat of some of our favorites from earlier in the mission: salad of fresh alfalfa sprouts, corn, and onions with a balsamic vinaigrette, and vegetable couscous. Tomorrow we will treat the newly-arrived Crew 89 with something dehydrated, as is traditional (at least, that's what Crew 87 did for us, and let me tell you we appreciated it).

I think we're leaving the hab in excellent shape for the next crew and we eagerly await their arrival tomorrow.

You know, given enough time you can get used to just about anything. Even though sleeping in the hab is a lot like trying to sleep on a park bench with an idling semi nearby, I'm now getting at least seven solid hours of sleep every night. My hands have gone from being so rough that they catch on my sweater to just being dry. And although I can't claim that I don't notice when I'm wearing a space suit, the feelings of claustrophobia and the harsh oppressive sound of my own breathing have vanished from my perceptions completely. The daily engineering tasks have become second nature, and crises that would have dominated our day in the early part of the mission are now taken in stride, with all of us leaping into immediate action so that no serious consequences occur.

Must be almost time to go home.

Even though we're only in the middle of our second week here, we feel the end of our rotation breathing down our necks. The new crew arrives Saturday, and we need to spend Friday cleaning up and doing our end-of-rotation paperwork, which means that today and tomorrow are our last two days in sim. Fortunately we have completed all of the suit study trials, have collected a bunch of rock samples for the microfossil and extremophile studies, and have finished work on the telescope, so we are in good shape, but there's still plenty of data analysis to do on those projects and lots of GPS tracking and geotagging yet to do.

And then we woke up and found the ground covered with snow from the front porch to the horizon. We thought Monday was a snow day, but that was really just a heavy frost and it was all gone within hours. This was SNOW -- at least a couple of inches of fluffy white stuff. Quite a shock after yesterday's blue skies and 50-degree temps.

And then the Internet went down! Trapped in a tin can, miles from civilization, and NO INTERNET!? Surely we would be shortly reduced to eating our own shoes! Fortunately, power-cycling the satellite modem a couple of times brought our connectivity back. We learned a few things from that incident that I documented in the Quick Guide.

Even with the Internet back we weren't sure what to do -- the fossil-hunting and GPS-tracking EVAs that we'd planned out last night weren't going to be possible with everything covered with snow. But Paul pointed out that we really needed to warm up the rovers so they'd be ready for tomorrow.

So we did. We made sure those rovers were good and warmed up. I believe the technical term is "Yee-Ha!"

Laksen and I came in while Paul, Diego, and Bianca were still warming up the rovers; I fixed corned beef hash for lunch while Laksen dealt with his daily engineering tasks. Then the gang came in to the traditional welcome beverage for those who come in from the snow, which is hot cocoa. Except that since this bunch is from Florida, Texas, Colombia, Sri Lanka, and Belgium, none of them knew about this tradition and I (from Wisconsin) had to explain it to them. They enjoyed the hot cocoa, though.

After lunch we saw that the sun had come out and the temperature had climbed to 47 degrees, so Laksen, Bianca, and I decided to try a GPS tracking run -- we'd stick to the main road and keep our speed down for safety. At first it was delightful, motoring across the fresh crisp snow, which sparkled in the sun and provided a delightful contrast with the red rocks and blue sky. But as we got further down the road and the temperatures continued to climb, the dirt beneath the snow changed to mud and the going got kind of nasty. We were slipping and sliding all over the place and the rovers' wheels were kicking up great quantities of brown and red goo; climbing hills turned into a real trial. I got stuck at one point, and Bianca had to take over my rover to get it out, but then I remembered the first lesson of driving in snow -- Don't Stop, Don't Slow Down -- and from then on I was fine. Still, it was pretty unpleasant, and then we couldn't find the next stretch of trail in the snow, so we decided to bag it and head back to the hab.

When we got back from that and cleaned up as much as possible, I worked on the Quick Guides. I have 9 one-page guides completed (ATVs, radios, webcams, white water system, black water system, gray water system and GreenHab, Internet, communication with the Mars Society, and EVA suit maintenance) and 2 to go (power system and engineering rounds), but I decided to print out and laminate what I've got. I also emailed them to a bunch of folks at the Mars Society and I hope they will be helpful for future missions.

Then it was time for dinner. I whomped up a batch of fried rice with tofu, miscellaneous vegetables, and rehydrated egg whites, which wasn't bad despite the fact that we're all out of soy sauce. Meanwhile Bianca rehydrated some cauliflower, topped it with Hollandaise sauce and rehydrated cheese, and popped it in the oven. It all came out delicious; just the thing for the end of a snowy day.

Woke up this morning to snow! A light dusting of snow on the ground and just a bit in the air. Changed the appearance of the place completely -- very pretty, though not very Marslike.

The snow threw our plans for the day into a cocked space helmet. The suit constraints study, for example, couldn't be done because you couldn't see the plants under the snow. So we brainstormed a bunch of other stuff that could be done, most of it in the hab.

It was at around this time that we noticed our Internet was running exceptionally slowly. We tried restarting the wifi router and the satellite modem, but that didn't help. We suspected the weather, which was overcast as well as snowy and very cold, but we've had overcast before and it hasn't hurt us like this. We contacted Mission Support -- connectivity was present, though very slow -- and they suggested that we might have hit our satellite Internet connection's bandwidth limit. However, even the bandwidth usage page was taking forever to load. Finally I managed to determine that we'd used over 250 MB -- more than 5 times our usual hourly usage -- between 8 and 9 AM. That might explain why our Internet usage was throttled, but we'd all been at breakfast at that time! We tried and tried to figure out what had been the cause, not to scapegoat anyone but to keep it from happening again. Eventually it seemed that one of us had not managed to completely turn off updates and their computer had perhaps automatically downloaded a large Windows update during that time. That's turned off now, so with any luck our connection will return to normal speed at midnight tonight and the problem will not recur. I really hope so, because being without reasonable Internet connectivity is a royal pain!

Once we got that issue sorted out -- or at least diagnosed -- Laksen and Bianca took off on a GPS trail-mapping run and I started work on some more Quick Guides. But what really got us excited was the idea of shooting our official portraits. For a backdrop we set up the Official Flag of Mars (red, green, and blue), a map of Mars, and a plaque about the Mars Society that usually hangs in the airlock, and we prepared to pose in front of it in our space suits (holding the helmet) and in our official crew polo shirts. But then various people wanted to spruce up for their photos, so we kind of lost momentum.

While we were waiting for the photos to happen, Paul and Laksen decided to go off on another GPS trail-mapping run. It looked pretty darn cold out there but they talked me into going along and I had a great time jouncing along on an ATV across barely-tracked rough terrain. In fact, if you've ever been to Disneyland, imagine the Indiana Jones ride over the countryside of Big Thunder Mountain Railway. Only rougher and longer. I quickly learned that on an ATV your suspension system is your knees, not your butt, and after a while I was galumphing across ruts and gulleys with hardly a second thought. It was great fun and we saw some fabulous scenery and picked up some fossil shells as well as mapping out the trail system.

We got back just in time for our crew photos, smiling for the camera in our space suits and polo shirts. Bianca takes the school photos for her kids' school, so she had the whole thing down pat. It was very familiar, but also kind of surreal, and I think the photos came out great. (Paul thinks I look like Michael Farraday in Lost.) School photo day on Mars.

Today is a cooking day, and we got kind of ambitious. Bianca and I prepared pasta, pesto sauce from a mix, and canned spaghetti sauce beefed up with sauteed onions, TVP, and spices. Bianca also made muffins, which came out great, and Diego popped up with alfalfa sprouts from the GreenHab, which we served as a salad with a dressing of balsamic vinegar and rehydrated onions. A meal fit for a king!

We had an excellent conversation over and after dinner, including Star Trek and Monty Python references, but now it's time for the writing of reports and other paperwork. With the Internet still throttled it's going to take a while to submit this so I think I'll stop writing and send it in now.

Oatmeal for breakfast today, immediately after which I suited up and headed out with Diego for his study on "Determination of error in biological sampling due to EVA suit constraints." Each trial in this study consists of one test subject spending 20 minutes going over a patch of desert and identifying, photographing, counting, and taking samples of each different type of plant found there, either in a space suit (experiment) or not (control). There are 5 patches of desert and each of us is doing all of them, randomly selected as to whether each is suited or non-suited. The luck of the draw was that I was scheduled for one non-suited trial and four suited.

I did the non-suited trial at the beginning of the mission, and today I did two of my four suited trials. Man, what a pain! The gloves are the worst part. Imagine taking a photograph, writing down a brief description, breaking off a bit of plant, and stuffing it in one of several plastic bags, all wearing heavy winter gloves. (You are also juggling the camera, clipboard, and plastic bags in your hands, which is not the way I think a real biological survey would work, but that's neither here nor there because we did it the same way in both trials.) The helmet makes it hard to see, the backpack makes it hard to balance, and all in all it's painstaking, tedious, hard work -- stoop labor on Mars. The worst part is when Diego throws all the samples away at the end of each trial (we aren't measuring accuracy, only number of samples collected). And I have two more suited trials to do. I can really see why the astronauts in The Right Stuff despised the scientists so much.

Right after I got back from that, I joined Paul and Laksen in the lab to work on the radiotelescope. We think we've thrashed out a workable design for an adjustable support structure that can be constructed using the materials at hand, and when we finished work yesterday we made sure all the relevant bits were taken inside so we could do as much as possible in the lab. We got the cables measured and cut, and later today we plan to drill the holes and tie knots so that we can do an EVA tomorrow morning and just set the thing up. Wish us luck.

Lunch was canned corned beef, which looked disgusting to me, but Bianca sauteed onions and added tomato powder and spices and served it over mashed potatoes and it was pretty good.

In the afternoon I was still kind of beat from the suit study in the morning and I decided to not participate in any EVAs and take care of some other business. I backed up my computer, rearranged my Monster Bag (there's no place to unpack it, so I've just been digging in it for everything I need and it's all gotten horribly jumbled up), vaccumed the lab (just to beat back the encroaching dust a bit), and took a nap. But when I saw the cool photos and videos everyone brought back I regretted not having done another EVA today.

While everyone else was returning from their EVAs, I cooked dinner. Usually at home I work from recipes, but Bianca's an improviser and after consulting with her I whomped up something I'd call Tofu Enchilada Style: sauteed dehydrated onions, tofu, a package of enchilada seasoning, canned spaghetti sauce, and dehydrated cheese served over a mix of white and brown rice. It was darn tasty, actually, but the real hit of the meal was the muffins Bianca made.

Our daily reports at http://desert.marssociety.org/mdrs/fs09/ are supposed to include photos, but they take 24 hours to be posted when it's working and it hasn't been working lately. In fact, we only have photos posted for 1/11 and 1/13, plus two (of the seven we submitted) for 1/14. We've been going back and forth with Mission Support on this, but the webmaster's on vacation and nobody else has the necessary passwords to address the situation. Frustrating. (I've been posting photos on my personal blog but they're not the same ones.)

Today started out much like yesterday, with a quick trip out to Engineering to warm up and gas up the ATVs. The weather was gorgeous, clear and crisp but not too cold, and even on that short ride I was struck anew by the sere beauty of this alien place. If it's nice again tomorrow I'll try to take a video.

After breakfast and morning briefing, Paul, Laksen, and I put our heads together over the bits of the radiotelescope in the science lab. As in the movie Apollo 13, our challenge is to make this fit into that using only this stuff. In our case the available stuff is a little more than they had in the Apollo capsule but it's still weirdly limited. The radiotelescope consists of four twenty-foot masts holding up two dipole antennas, and they have to be braced with guy wires, but we don't have wire, just rope (and it's several different varieties of rope scavenged from various other projects); we don't have turnbuckles or eye bolts; and we don't have all the tools we'd like, but we do have an entire large plastic container full of various kinds of adhesive tape. It's like trying to do a home remodeling project at your beach house, if your beach house were too far from the nearest town to buy anything you left at home.

Another thing we did this morning is that we decided the hab was getting pretty scruffy, so we buckled down for a couple hours of cleaning. If you saw on the webcam that Bianca, the only woman, was mopping the floor on the residential level, please be reassured that the guys were sweeping and vacuuming like mad in the lab and the EVA room (where the webcam is still out of order -- sorry, I'll look into that soon, I hope). We also took out all the garbage and discards, scrubbed the toilet, and swept out the airlocks. The place looks much, much better now and we've instituted a strict shoe policy (no outside or downstairs shoes upstairs) to keep the dust from getting into the residential areas. It's a bit like being Japanese.

After a really thorough cleaning we were ready for a good hot lunch. As it is a "cooking" day, we could fix whatever we wanted... though, again, it's a matter of making this fit into that using only this stuff. We have nothing fresh, very little meat and very little that isn't dehydrated. We wound up with a very nice creamy wild rice soup, chili, and mashed potatoes with cheese. Hot and filling.

Most of my afternoon was spent in a space suit, just outside the hab, setting up the radiotelescope. We started by driving lengths of pipe into the ground to act as bases for the masts, using what I call The First Tool: a big rock. Then we drilled holes into the masts in some places and attached pipe clamps in others so that we had somewhere to attach the guy ropes, measured and cut the guy ropes, and erected one mast. But as soon as we got it up we realized the antenna's coaxial cable is not long enough to reach the antenna at its new height. We took measurements, took the mast back down, and called it a day; an unknown number of days of work remain, but we are optimistic that we can finish it before the end of this rotation. If there's more coaxial cable in the hab somewhere.

I was pretty wiped out after that and I declined to join in the afternoon's geological EVA. While they were gone I recorded a brief video tour of the hab, which is something I've been meaning to do for some time, and caught up on some paperwork. Steve, Bianca, and Laksen came back with some great pictures, lots of geological samples, and the story of having run into a couple of local tourists who were just pleased as punch to get their pictures taken shaking hands with a real live Martian. Steve's microfossil search achieved success: he found a fossil ostracod! Diego also found life this afternoon, specificially endoliths (cryptoendolithic algae) in some minerals he collected this morning.

Then came the time of staring into the cupboard and wondering what to fix for dinner. We found a box of couscous and Bianca got the brainstorm to prepare a vegetable couscous. We rehydrated onions and sauteed them, added broccoli, corn, peas, and carrots rehydrated in water with a couple boullion cubes, and topped it off with half a can of tomato paste and a variety of spices. Served over couscous cooked in the water we drained off the vegetables after rehydration, it was really really good. We also had "blueberry" muffins that Paul fixed from a Jiffy boxed mix. Best dinner yet, and great conversation over it as well.

Unfortunately that dinner took rather a lot of time to prepare, so I didn't get around to writing my report until quite late. I have to submit this in the next five minutes or Mission Support will be unhappy with me, so off it goes!

If my updates are only whetting your appetite, here are some other sources of up-to-the-minute information on MDRS-88:

• Live webcams: http://freemars.org/mdrscam/
• Official daily logs and some photos: http://desert.marssociety.org/mdrs/fs09/
• Laksen's blog: http://laksensblog.blogspot.com
• Paul's blog: http://paulgoestomars.blogspot.com
• Diego's blog (in Spanish): http://www.eltiempo.com/blogs/dejame_mi_espacio/
• Bianca's blog (in Dutch): http://bloggen.be/biancagoestomars/
• My Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/daviddlevine
• Diego's Twitter feed (in English and Spanish): http://twitter.com/diegou
• MDRS Updates Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/MDRSupdates

Today was a fix-it day for me. After the morning's briefing I checked over the EVA packs to make sure they were all charged up for the day's activity, but pack 4 was not charging and not functional. I tried all the basic useful stuff like wiggling the connections but it seems completely dead. It's probably just a loose connection somewhere. We decided that we could make it through today with only 5 packs. I also attached Velcro to our laminated name tags so we can all have our names on our space suits.

In the second half of the morning, Laksen and I went up to the Musk Observatory, which is out of commission for now because the telescope has failed and been sent back to the manufacturer, to see if we could get the two outdoor webcams back on line. We had been told that the computer at the Musk, which controls those webcams as well as the telescope (when the telescope is there) had failed due to low temperatures. Maybe it did, but it's a bit warmer today than it was last week and the thing booted right up. However, both webcams were really messed up in their positioning. This might have something to do with the fact that for a camera mount each one was just duct taped to a rock. I un-taped them and re-taped each one's stand firmly to the shelf on which they sit. We got one camera working properly and the other came up by itself later in the day, when the sun was no longer shining directly in its eye. That gets us up to five working cameras out of six (it was only three when we arrived) and I'll see if I can fix the sixth and improve the positioning of the second Musk camera tomorrow.

After lunch, Paul, Steve, and I went out on EVA #2. This was Steve's first EVA and Paul and I, now the Old Hands, walked him through the suiting procedure. We took the three ATVs out to the very end of the trail, which put us within hiking distance of a mineral formation where we had reason to believe we might find microfossils (Foraminifera, Radiolaria and Diatoms). The formation proved to be pretty inaccessible, but Steve bravely clambered up an unstable slope and collected two bags of samples. Steve's initial microscopic analysis didn't find any fossils, but he did find a micrometeorite and there are more samples yet to examine. We also got a bunch of fine photos.

This is the farthest and the fastest I have ever gone on an ATV. For safety's sake we wore motorcycle helmets, with our EVA helmets bungeed on the back rack, but on the way out all three of us managed to have the helmet fall off at some point. Mine suffered a cracked sun shield but that was the worst of the damage, fortunately. This explains why four of the six helmets have some kind of crack in the visor. After the third such incident we switched to carrying the helmets in front of us, perched on the gas tank. It was exciting and a lot of fun, but when the MDRS came in sight at the end of that trip I must confess I said to myself "Hab, sweet hab!" I'm a little achy but feel very satisfied and pleased with myself.

Very shortly after our return Laksen, Diego, and Bianca went out on EVA #3, their first EVA. Paul and I helped them suit up and took tons of pictures. They were all very excited, like kids on the first day of school. Paul and I waved as they rode off into the distance, pleased and proud at our babies leaving the nest. When they came back we helped them unsuit. It was a busy and productive time and I felt very professional, checking each pack to make sure its straps were tight and hoses properly fastened. "Looks like we've got an intermittent malf on #3," I said in my Astronaut Voice. After all this work with the backpacks I felt almost proprietary toward them as I racked them up. My babies! Two of the packs actually came back from EVA #3 with problems, which means we currently have only three working packs. Paul and I will look at the malfunctioning ones after dinner in hopes of bringing at least one or two of them back online.

We had a bit of excitement this evening when one of the crew went downstairs to take a sponge bath at the sink in the Science and Engineering Bay. When this person asked us to not come downstairs for a little bit, we pointed out that there's a webcam covering that area. Eek! I rushed to cover the camera (without looking) and wound up falling down the last couple of steps. Fortunately I landed well and didn't hurt myself, no Naughty Bits appeared on the webcam, and we all learned an Important Lesson.

You may have noticed that an ongoing theme of this report, and all other reports from MDRS, is fighting with malfunctioning infrastructure. (And I haven't even mentioned the fun times we've been having with the toilet.) I believe that this is an important part of our mission here -- the problems we are having are not the same problems a real Mars mission would have, but the time we spend on problems and the way we react to them are representative of the schedule and psychological problems a real Mars astronaut would have. Certainly the daily struggles of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers to survive on the surface of a harsh and unforgiving planet show that persistence, ingenuity, and improvisation will continue to be necessary skills for all kinds of explorers in new environments.