February 28th, 2019
Sol 4 : What on Earth is going on?
On their way to White Rock Canyon, the EVA team stumbled upon a Coke bottle. In the middle of a Martian hike, Norbert, Jérémy, Aurélien and Cerise are sent back to planet Earth.
Our planet is endangered, with limited resources, and we continue to pollute and threaten her, even if we are all aware of the danger. Here in the MDRS we are monitoring our water consumption, our trash and our energy consumption. For 4 days now we have been following a simple, but healthy and sustainable way of life. We realized that our habits are greedy on resources, on water, on energy. And that it is not that complicated to change and adopt better ones. Even if we want to send humans to Mars, or to the Moon, Earth is and will stay our cradle and our home and we all need to protect her! Countries have the duty to adopt laws to promote ecology and sustainable development, companies have the duty to use wisely their energies and resources, and at our scale with have the duty to adopt a sustainable way of life. We all have this duty for us, for our children and for all humanity.
At the same time in the Hab, Gaspard and I choose to prepare a surprise olive bread for the crew’s lunch. Unfortunately that first try was very different from the texture of French baguettes, but everybody loved the taste and it was a huge pleasure to feel a little bit like in France.
After lunch, everybody in the Hab chose to take a nap before the beginning of the human factors experiments. Sadly, both versions of TELEOP experiment failed today : the little rover faced connection issues and the computer of the digital version ran out of battery, with a broken charger. This experiment matters a lot for all of us, especially for Jérémy and so the rest of the afternoon was very difficult for us.
The good news of the day came from Cerise’s water quality monitoring. Yesterday, the results seemed worrisome. After an exchange with the research team, the comparison database that she was using was the one dedicated to space, and to Thomas Pesquet’s Aquapad experiment on the ISS. With the correct database, the water quality is not perfect, but safe to drink and not infected.
After the disappointment of the afternoon, we all needed a distraction. For that, Norbert brought us some fresh carrots from the Green-Hab for dinner and we decided to watch an episode of Nat Geo’s Mars TV show.
Author : Benjamin Auzou, Journalist
