March 6th, 2019
Sol 10: Into the Wind
I spent a very bad night, measured by my Dreem headband as 5 hours 49 minutes night. This device is a sleeping band we wear each night and that monitor our sleep quality : duration, sleep phases, agitation… Confinement has a sneaky infuence on humans. It can change behaviour, impulsivity, irritability or motivation. Personnaly, it seems to have an impact on my sleep!
Sadly we have no pictures of the EVA of the Day, indeed we left the Hab with no SD card in the camera. We have a lot of checks before leaving the airlock : working suit, gloves, med kit, GPS, watch, radios. Unfortunately this morning we were attentive on the security check and forgot that little card! The walk was beautiful between Canyons, the Reservoir Dam, flat and rocky areas. We shot a lot of pictures with our eyes, sealed in our memories : “Click” as our astronomer and executive officer like to say in such moments.
The MDRS Campus has been visited today by a film crew. They were very respectful of our mission and we managed to continue our martian work and life without seeing them any time. Except Jérémy that have been interviewed for the documentary.
In the afternoon, the Hab was hit by the wind. Thanks to our weather station, we were supposed to receive the values of the wind: direction and speed. Unfortunately for us, the wind was too strong for the installation and the tripod fell on the ground. The martian soil is not ideal to fix things with pegs. We will go for a reinstallation and reparation (if necessary) EVA tomorrow. It’s sad when we think that less than three hours before we were next to it changing the batteries. The adaptation to environment is important for missions to Mars. On Earth, the most similar example is science lead in the Sahara Desert or in Antarctica.
The end of the afternoon was more calm and relaxed. The wind stopped making noises around the MDRS. We were all together in the Hab talking, working on our reports, and watching VR videos for a human factors experiment.
We faced snow at the beginning of the mission, then rain, and now wind is threatening us. The martian climate isn’t clement with us! But we managed to adapt our mission and our goal each time the weather changed!
Author : Benjamin Auzou, Journalist
