Sol Summary – November 11th
Sol Summary Report (SSR):
Sol# 48
Person filling out report: Annalea Beattie
Summary Title: Yes, its Friday, the Expanse, omelet rice and pineapple upside-down cake!
Mission Status: on track
Sol Activity Summary:
We began the day with the internet down (so we switched it off) and a bit more cleaning up this morning. This is the life everywhere, there is no escape from cleaning.
Rishu, (Anushree) and I washed all the glass science equipment and stored it. Alex worked on his suit interface. I answered some questions about our Mars 160 mission for some school children on a word doc. Yusuke continued the food inventory in preparation for the Arctic, (Phase Two of our mission). Jon wrote reports, Anastasiya wrote reports, Claude- Michel wrote reports and cooked lunch. The EVA team left and returned, ate lunch then prepared to leave again and left. Claude-Michel continued with the food report, the engineering report, the smartpot report and his log. Anu processed samples. Yusuke was Hab-Com for the away team, worked on his own dome project and cooked omelet rice for dinner. This afternoon I had a great few hours work in my room, planning field drawing experiments in the space suit for the next week and writing up my notes, Then I cooked a pineapple-upside down cake which turned out pretty well, surprising. Yes! The Expanse is tonight.
MDRS lessons:
- Make sure you have enough rest otherwise your body will kick you back badly.
(Anastasiya)
- Colour changes that are obvious in Google Earth imagery are not so obvious on the ground. (Jon)
Plans: EVA – Hypoliths quadrats tomorrow
Crew Physical Status: Much improved.
Weather: Nice day.
Anomalies: Back pack failure on EVA and return to base.
Space suits have to be learnt the hard way. Today our geology crew returned early from an EVA after the charge in a back pack failed half up Hab Ridge. One crew member was very hot by the time we removed the space suit. This is an anomaly, the second time this has happened this mission which is probably statistically very good.
I didn’t but you probably know that early space suits had just compressed oxygen bottles so air was cooled (sometimes very cold ) when it came out. The suits were cooled only by oxygen air flow like ours. Current technology uses an inner suit as a cooling garment. Little tubes carrying water go everywhere around the body. The water passes through a sublimater which freezes liquid to ice and then the ice sublimes and cools the circulating tubes of water. It still sounds pretty basic to me but how would I know? Anyhow, anomaly sorted and the EVA continued this afternoon.