February 22, 2018
SOL 4 – Crew 189 : Back to its lo(a)cation!
Journalist report
The ringing tone of my alarm woke me up once more as early as 6.30 am, a few minutes before Victoria traditional knock on our doors. Our next day off will certainly be significantly appreciated by our crew, as the departure to the sport session looked more like a zombie parade than like a team of astronauts leaving to their mission. Yet the sport made its effect, and half an hour later the crew looked way more in shape, ready to tackle the day! Gabriel, Jérémy, Laurent and Victoria were the ones to go out today, with the double mission of install both Laurent’s solar panels experiment and Jérémy’s LOAC, hoping it would not be forced to come back home a third time.
However, they started to fall behind as some of the spacesuits seemed to have ventilation issues, and they had to choose other ones. They thus went outside 10 minutes late, leaving Benoît, Louis and I 3 spacesuits to fix.
The team first stopped at Gabriel’s MegaARES, in order to put a box around the batteries. However, Gabriel scratched some cables doing so. Yet the damages were not so high, and one return trip to the Hab would be enough to fix it and to redeploy it shortly after. In the meantime, Laurent set his solar panels experiment: he tries to estimate the impact of dust on the performances of such panels. To get an idea of the optimal power, he plugged down Gabriel’s discharged phone, and planned to get it back some time later. It was also finally time for Jérémy to install his LOAC: and at last this time, everything worked as expected! He could finally go on with experiment. The team then came back to the Hab to let us fix the broken cables, with which Benoît and Louis dealt quite easily.
After a small detour to the MegaARES, the team went on exploration on the rovers. Gabriel was yet a bit upset about Victoria’s driving, which must have been too sporty for him. Our in-training astronauts last stopped once more in the instruments zone to get back Gabriel’s phone. The results were outstanding! It was now 70% charged after only half an hour! Meanwhile in the Hab, Louis and I worked on fixing the ventilation system of the spacesuits, while Benoît had the difficult job to make one of our gloves become tactile, a job he was able to accomplish by weaving a small metal wire in one of the fingers.
A usual, the afternoon was dedicated to human factors experiments, but only after Louis taught us how to play to card game Hanabi, certainly his favourite. We underwent our traditional session of defusing bombs: while Jérémy, Victoria and I had a lot of success, it was a bit harder for Laurent, Louis and Benoît, who seemed to have some difficulties to operate with numbers. Jérémy then caught me to participate to his own experiment. 10 minutes later, I was sitting in the Greenhab, with electrodes on my bare chest! The aim was here to control a rover located in the science dome with a camera system, in order to follow a defined path drawn on the floor. These events finalized a rather quiet day, like the calm before a potential storm in the next days.