I woke up today with a strident but nice “happy birthday” from Victoria, late for the awakening as usual. It is a bit special to celebrate your birthday so far from home. I wouldn’t be able to gather a lot of friends, or to phone anybody for a long time, just a couple of mails from well informed relatives, who knew how to contact me. But anyway, everybody here was happy to wish me a happy birthday, and it was a pleasure to spend it on Mars, going around for my second EVA. I didn’t regret at any time being here instead of being at home.

Our preparation was more efficient than yesterday, everybody knowing what to do, so that we left on time. We were going to explore a canyon called Candor chasma, and left the base by pairs in our electrical rovers. After twenty minutes, we reached the entry of it. The place was absolutely stunning. Along with my crewmates, Louis, Xavier and Victoria, we walked in the bottom of it, for about an hour and back, in a beautiful landscape. Sadly, I had a lot of trouble with fog during this time. Because of the heat, and the sweat, it accumulated on the helmet, forcing me to shoot most of my photos blind at the time.

Hopefully, back on the rover, it went better. We climbed a hill, giving us a nice view on the surroundings and the MDRS, got lost, travelled a bit on the rovers, and finally had a little time left to shoot photos and videos. Then, we went back to the hab, to have lunch, and eat the beautiful birthday cake Simon had cooked for me.

The afternoon was more quiet. Everybody working on his own. Mouâdh prepared for the deployment of the seismometer, planned for tomorrow. Simon repaired the balloon, Arthur launched the first water analysis with aquapad… And to make this day happier, Mouâdh just learned he was accepted in CalTech for next year!

Next day, I will not be part of the third EVA, which goal is to bury the seismometer in the hole we dig yesterday.

Today was the day of our first EVA. I was going to go out with Arthur, our Commander, and today also EVA leader, Mouâdh and Simon. We had two goals: find a place to bury the seismometer and if possible dig in there, and try our first use of the balloon. The EVA was planned from 9:00 a.m. to noon. In order not to start late, we had a quick breakfast after the sport session, before suiting up.

Preparing for the EVA was more challenging than expected. Everything that seemed trivial before became a problem. For instance, the only fact that we had to block our earplugs to be sure that they would never leave our head during three hours was not that simple, and no earplug means no radio contact, that clearly doesn’t help on the outside. That is why we tried different styles of earplug fixation methods. Mouâdh went straight forward: a cap under the helmet. Arthur used his head lamp. Simon used his engineer skills, building a headband out of bubble wrap. Then, I went through the pragmatic way: tape. Anyway, this small crew after having dressed up properly went in the airlock a few three minutes late. Good for a first time.

Our first steps outside were pretty disturbing: the backpack is heavy, the gloves restrain us from any precise movement, and fog accumulates quickly on the glass of our helmets. We had to begin the EVA by different checks: water and fuel level, battery of the rovers, etc… And to refuel what needed to be. This whole time, we were guided on the radio by Xavier, our engineer, in charge of this surveillance. I also realised very quickly that having a reflex camera and a video camera around my neck would not help in acting outside. More than this, using the camera was very hard. I prepared before, configuring it to be usable without the visor, but the fact that it was attached to my neck, kept away from my eyes by the helmet and its fog made me shoot more than half of the photos blind, even if the result wasn’t that bad as I discovered afterwards.

After a quick rover trip, we reached a plain in which we deployed the balloon. It went almost surprisingly well for a first shot. The balloon after having been fill up, went up as high as the rope let him. We just did not anticipate the wind that was blowing 20 meters high, preventing our balloon from going straight up. The result was impressive and we had our first graph of pressure and temperature, along with a beautiful shot. We also found the right place for the seismometer, in a dry river bed, and started to dig the hole, in which we will deploy it.

At the same time, in the hab, Victoria managed to start growing the freshly received lettuce in the Vegidair. Louis gave the first shot in cooking pancakes and the second in baking bread. We might live abroad, but already have to eat, and cooking will help in diverting our meals.

Tomorrow will start by another EVA in which I will take part for the second time, with Louis as leader, Victoria and Xavier.

Today was our first day alone : even if yesterday was Sol 1, we saw Shannon and her dogs in the morning, breathed the fresh air, felt the sun… Today was our first day locked in. No EVA was planned for today because of our gloves missing (that arrived late this evening in the engineering airlock, brought by Santa Shannon, along with seeds and fertilizers for our brand new Vegidair, the autonomous vegetable garden), so that nobody left. But this time was precious: we now were able to launch our experiments for real, having lots of time, and being able to spend time together, to set the bases of our routine.

As meant to become usual, we started our day by a sport session, easier that yesterday, real business being planned for every other day. We started the morning by a series of tasks we never had time to do before: I checked with Xavier the life support system, helmets and walkie-talkie for future EVAs, Victoria while taking care of her plants in the greenhab, collected our first lettuce, grown by the previous crew, Simon and Arthur worked on the balloon acquisition system, while Louis and Mouâdh worked on the EMUI (Hud simulation by connected glasses).

For lunch, we enjoyed eating our first native Martian lettuce, along with what was supposed to be “premium ham”. As usual, both were very convincing, talking about taste, even if the contrast of charisma was shocking: one being overly attractive, because of its freshness, the other being stored in a can, just to look more like pet food. Anyway, to end up talking about food, we gave us our first shot in trying to bake bread. It just tried to run away from its bread machine, looking for freedom, after having tripled of volume, but did not manage to escape from us.

This afternoon, we had a briefing with Xavier, our crew engineer, about all the equipment we will use from tomorrow in EVA, and about all the check-ups to do while in it. We also had a brainstorming about the video blog, filmed some shots, worked on the preparation of our experiments for EVAs… To sum up, we now know what to do and are kept busy.

I am very excited about tomorrow, probably like at least the 3 colleagues that will follow me in the first EVA, which goal is to explore the surroundings to find the right place to burry our seismometer, operated by Mouâdh. But for now, I must leave you, to go enjoy our rehydrated Valentine’s dinner…

Today is the first real Sol, mission starts at 2:00 p.m., and it is in this perspective that we woke up this morning: ready to deal with it. That is why the theoretical awakening was at 7:00 a.m. As everybody who knows me would expect, I was unable to simply move before 7:30, but the intention was here. We started the day by a sport session prepared by our crew health and safety officer, Simon, testing his sport program in situ for the first time. He experiments on him the effects of the mission on his physical performances, so that we could not miss joining him for a bit of team building while sweating together. Even if the breakfast was to come, Xavier and I might have done it with a bit too much zeal, being close to throw up at the end of it. Anyway, after a quick breakfast, everybody was happy to have burnt a few calories, and ready for the beginning of the day: finishing the building of the fence, then go out a little with the ATVs to discover the neighbourhood before noon.

Finishing the fence was pretty quick, we mostly had to cover what we built yesterday with plastic, and fix it. I started a new job as a journalist, filming scenes, to start to pile up shots, in order to be able to prepare a video blog, that should be released during the second week. Then, we hurried a little to be able to go out before noon. We reached a beautiful spot where the MDRS was visible. The landscape was really stunning, especially under such a sun, and till our arrival, we never really took the time to pay attention to it.

For lunch, we had our first rehydrated meat, clearly bad-looking, reminding us dog food, and stinking horribly before being boiled, but a new time, it was surprisingly good. Most of rehydrated food just seems to lose most of its taste, but with little spices, it is clearly not that hard to eat. At 1:00 p.m. we had our first briefing on our own, settling our personal and collective goals, informing everyone more precisely about our personal agenda, and determining our first priorities for EVAs. Then, at 2:00, the time had come: we closed the airlock. The scene was theatrical but also meaningful: nobody would ever go out without a space suit during the next 3 weeks…

The afternoon was filled with a bit of arrangement, organising the lower deck, moving stuff between the modules. Then, everybody work on his own, sometimes by pair: Arthur and Louis established a first EVA planning, Victoria listed all plants and equipment from the greenhab, Mouadh assembled and tested the seismometer, Xavier and Simon built a customized (I said customized on purpose) furniture for the Vegidair, and I worked on all the pictures and films we took from the past two days. We now are in a good atmosphere of work, everyone being busy. I did not really imagine that days would last this few before coming…

After having spent our first night in the crowded hab, had our first Martian breakfast and said good bye to the previous crew, we started the day by a long briefing with Shannon, the station director. At the end of it we decided to delay the beginning of the simulation by one day for two main reasons: the first one was that one of our suitcase containing the seismometer and its acquisition system (the same one that was lost by the airline company) had been taken by error by the previous crew so that we would have to wait till the evening to get it back, the second being that we wanted to build the ending of the fence that connects the hab to the other modules, in order to stay enclosed while changing of module.

After having organised and listed the food stocks, we had our first meal from rehydrated food, that surprisingly tasted pretty good. To be honest, I was not very confident in the taste of those poor broccolis, I had seen completely dried few minutes ago, but after all, it might not be that horrible to survive here! The afternoon started by an ATV initiation with Shannon, then soon, we started the construction of the fence to end the tunnel, while Louis Maller and Mouadh went to town to buy the plastic to cover our new fence. Standing beyond it, we had to take that picture illustrating the well-known sentence: “We need to build a wall, and the Martians will pay for it”.

Besides, we start to feel at home in the hab: we now have our rooms -except for Xavier, sleeping on the loft, near his water tank as a good crew engineer-, we are accustomed to the water pump, regularly activating and shaking the whole floor at the same time, and are starting to know our roles. Everybody is very excited at the moment, ready for the simulation to officially begin tomorrow evening.

It would be way too long to detail all of the adventures that we had to live to reach Grand Junction, Colorado, the closest city to the MDRS to have an airport. Let me just bring up some of it from different members of the crew: a luggage was forgotten by the airline company in London, then taken to Charlotte (at the opposite of the country to be clear), so that we only were able to pick it up 2 hours before leaving. A flight was delayed by 6 hours due to an air cooling system failure, ending up by the missing of the next flight and in an unexpected night in Phoenix alone. A 24 hours’ bus trip from San Francisco, besides a woman, persuaded that Queen Elisabeth was a reptilian eating children and controlling people amongst with other leaders with a red gas, extended by 6 hours because of an engine failure in the middle of the desert. An arrival at 5 p.m. after a 4 hours’ night…

Anyway, at noon, we were able to share our first meal in Grand Junction together, before leaving for Hanksville and its Mars Desert Research Station. Filling up the SUV with all the seven of us and our luggage was the funny part, spending 3 hours in it was less comfortable: the poor car was crowded to the top and we were all -except the driver- having stuff on or between our knees. But the landscape was for sure worth it. After 1 hour straight, we started to discover western movies like landscapes, with single hills surrounded by desert plains. The road we were following being the only thing reminding us somebody once came here before.

At last, we reached it: the station appeared at the very last moment from beyond a hill, almost unexpected in such a natural landscape. The ‘big’ hab, surrounding its little brothers: the science dome, the greenhab, and the telescope. Then, we spend the end of the day meeting the crew 174, made of 5 welcoming Indian marsonauts, that briefed us about our different tasks, depending on our roles. We will now spend the evening and the night together, then tomorrow, have a whole day off to settle and prepare before the closure of the airlock, on Sunday evening.

Given how our night had been drastically shortened, and because we risked another power outage, we decided to cancel today’s EVA and reschedule it to tomorrow morning. As a result, instead of staying up and starting the day normally, many of us went back to bed… According to our commander, it felt like a Sunday morning at MDRS: some of us sleeping, some working, some cleaning the Hab. 

By late morning, had once again all hands on deck: Adrien in the GreenHab, Quentin working on the environmental sensors, Alice writing an article on meteorites. Today was also official launching day for EchoFinder: Jérémy and I, then Adrien and Corentin took turns being subject and operator, to detect specific, pre-scanned organs during a session at CNES, the French space agency.

After this strange day, we are ready and rested for our rescheduled EVA: building the weather station near the MegaAres antenna. We hope that tonight, the power generator will take its revenge and win the fight against the cold! 

This was the crew’s first high-stakes EVA science-wise, and we were all aware of the importance of this experiment : the MegaAres antenna is supposed to stay in place during the entire mission to collect data on the electric field of the Martian atmosphere. After collecting all the parts and tools in the engineering airlock, and loading everything into the rovers, the unexpected happened, as always.

After debriefing the EVA over some lunch prepared by Alice, a nap was deemed necessary, and approved by our Crew Scientist who had even thought of including it in the original schedule. But there was no time to waste: tomorrow, another EVA to the same location is scheduled to set up a weather station! Quentin, Jérémy and Alexandre spent their afternoon preparing, while the others worked on their various tasks in the Hab. In the persisting cold, the generator is struggling to keep some of the appliances up and running. We are currently running the Coms window gathered around scavenged flashlights! Luckily, the heater is still working miracles… This first week, on which rests the correct implementation of our main experiments, is stressful for all of us, but we are still in great shape!

The test session for the EchoFinder experiment, designed to aid astronauts in performing ultrasounds
using an AI and augmented reality, was a bit chaotic: The support arm used to maintain the tablet was
not usable, and one of the two QR cubes used to track the device was wrongly positioned. We will make
some adjustments before the first actual session takes place later this week.

After a very active morning, eating Alice’s freshly baked bread for lunch was the perfect fixer upper. A
few laughs and a good meal gave us the energy to continue plowing through the day. In the afternoon,
the Hab went somewhat quiet as everyone went their separate ways to complete their tasks, and took
turns completing cognitive tests and posture analyses. By 6pm, thanks to Alexandre, the MegaAres
antenna was ready for tomorrow’s important EVA!

In sum, a quiet Sol, in anticipation and preparation of the next.