Phoenix and Pole Dancing!

Updates! Updates!

First: the Phoenix Lander is descending on Mars this evening, a little before 8pm (Eastern). Watch it and learn more here.

Second: I’m going adventuring from the Arctic to the Antarctic for the next nine months. Read about it at xyzena.com

The TV Channels Available at NASA

This amused me maybe more than it should’ve last night. Here are the TV channels currently working in my room:

6 – NASA channel

7 – NASA channel

8 – NASA channel

9 – NASA channel

10 – NASA channel

13 – CSPAN

30 – Weather Channel

58 – PBS

68 – Comedy Central

70 – Discovery Channel

74 – National Geographic

79 – SciFi

98 – NASA channel

It’s like they’ve customized television, just for me! The best part? There is something different on every single one of those NASA channels. This is possibly the best cable package I’ve ever seen.

I’m off to explore Ames for an hour before my meetings start. GIFT SHOP, HERE I COME.

That Time I Went to NASA

I feel obliged to write in this blog for the first time in more than three months … because I’m hanging out at NASA right now! I am in California, at NASA Ames. They flew me out to meet the folks I’ll be working with this summer. There’s not too much to say yet, since I just got here. I’m staying at the NASA Lodge, in Bldg. 19, which is this weird dorm/barracks thing. As far as I can tell, the Lodge hasn’t been redecorated since the 1970s.  The guy at the front desk was wearing a NASA baseball hat and playing World of Warcraft.  No surprises there, I guess.   I can’t wait to go exploring in the daylight. For now, all I can tell is that my window looks out on an enormous blimp hangar (NASA’s famous “Hangar One” … which, incidentally, has been used a few times in episodes of MythBusters).

Goodbye Hab

Late last night Crew 64 arrived: an Australian, two Americans, a Canadian, a Jamaican, and a Norwegian (all a good bit older than my crew).  I felt uncontrollably defensive.  After seeing only the same five people all day, every day, for two weeks, having anyone else there felt very wrong.  The fact that they would be taking our hab from us didn’t help matters, either. 

This morning we awoke before dawn to the theme from 2001:  A Space Odyssey, just like we did on our first morning.  The next three hours were spent frantically training Crew 64 on all the operations of the hab before taking the crew changeover photo out front.  We packed up and headed out for Salt Lake City (though not after saying goodbye to The Don).  Not long after we left the desert, we hit a serious snowstorm in the mountains.

I am skipping the part where I said goodbye to my crew.

My flight is early tomorrow morning.  I’m at my hotel in Salt Lake, and looking forward to a hot shower (which I expect will equate to more water than I’ve used, total, in the last two weeks).

This has been the best two weeks I can remember.

Travel is a strange feeling.  This time yesterday I was watching the last episode of Firefly with my crew.  Tomorrow I’ll be with my family, and about 36 hours from now I’ll be back at school in Chapel Hill.

Thanks to all of you for sharing this experience with me. 

To my crew:  You are what made these two weeks so incredible.  In case bawling my eyes out three times today wasn’t enough of a clue, I’ll miss you all like crazy.  See you again soon, and always remember what she said…

Goodbye, Mars.  I’ll be back.

Over My Head

Nobody likes to feel useless or inexpert. I have a long way to go before I am neither … an insight I have most certainly gained from my experience at MDRS. Some of my crew mates have proven to be prodigious engineers and multidisciplinary whizzes. I’ve always advocated having a wide range of skills. I can hold my own in a genetics laboratory or on the athletic field, and I’ve accrued a respectable level of ability in music and poetry. When it comes to “real life skills,” though, I’m pretty far behind, considering I want to be an astronaut.

Engineering, for example, is something I’ve never gotten into, and something I really ought to get into. Computers, basic construction, engines, and the likes are still foreign territory to me. My list of useful things to do before I graduate college also includes getting a ham (amateur) radio license and a private pilot’s license. It probably wouldn’t hurt for me to learn some more geology, physics, astronomy ….

I’ve enjoyed getting a feel for how the hab runs, and I’m glad I abandoned my trivial biology endeavors here to follow around some of the engineers. I’d never so much as touched a generator before this adventure, or even checked the oil of any engine, for that matter. Last night I spent some time with the toilet (which is still not quite fixed), and today I had some close encounters with the grey water system. “Grey water” is basically the stuff that goes down the kitchen drain, which is then pumped into the GreenHab (our greenhouse) and then cycled through a number of filters before being used to flush the toilet (if the poor little thing ever gets the chance to flush again). Pretty cool, actually.

Long story short, I’ll be coming back to school revamped and ready to dump more information than ever into my tiny little skull.

Tomorrow is our last full day here. After scrambling to finish up a couple projects, we might take a field trip out into the wilderness. Crew 64 should be arriving sometime after 5pm, and we’ll get until noon-ish the next day to train them and say goodbye to our pod-home in the desert. I’m not ready to part with this place, or with these people.

I probably won’t be updating this blog tomorrow, for the sake of enjoying the last hours with my crew. Stay tuned for the final chapter of my trip to Mars, and a heap of photos. (See you soon, Mom and Dad … let’s hope my plane takes off this time!)

Hab Habits

Today the whole crew donned the suits for a six-person EVA. It was mostly just a desert frolic-turned-photo shoot. I’m hoping before the end of my stay here the group will have a chance to head out to the fossil fields about a kilometer to the east.

With the spacesuit on, it’s easy to trick myself into thinking I’m actually on Mars. Not that the suits are particularly high-tech, but they do their job. As awesome as it would be to run around Utah wearing a legitimate suit, they’re a tad expensive (thousands of bucks)! After all, we are (though I hate to admit it) still on Earth, so there’s no need for pressurized suits with fancy-pants regulatory systems. At MDRS, the idea is more to simulate how cumbersome normal tasks can be in a suit, and these suits certainly accomplish that.

We are all beginning to get very tired. As a crew, we have to be completely self-sufficient, which means there’s a lot to do besides the science and engineering projects we came for. Every four hours the generator has to be refueled (even in the middle of the night), we have to make our own bread, fix our own toilet, etc. … Thank goodness for my crew mates, or I would not have made it. Between them, they’ve built an impressive resume of cookin’ and fixin’.

It’s hard to believe I only have four days left here. I’ve just gotten it figured out.

Oxygen Requires The Don to Live

New Year’s Eve, I thought about counting down to midnight like this:

10… 9… 8… 7… 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… BLASTOFF!

But then I decided that’d be a little too corny. Even for me.

Here is a blog post full of non sequitur:

We got up this morning to watch the first sunrise of the year from Radio Ridge, but managed to miss it. We’ll try again tomorrow … get outside extra early. The ISS will be passing overhead again, too, this time when the sky is still dark.

We have almost finished the skirt around the hab, to keep the wind out from underneath it. I got to play with saws today.

Jeff has only one lung.

The crew has really bonded by now. MDRS has been, at least for me, even more of a social experiment than scientific. Group dynamics are critical in any long-duration mission … imagine being stuck on a spaceship for six months en route to Mars! Ten days is hardly a drop in the six-month bucket, but I’ve been amazed how well complete strangers have not only gotten along, but really worked as a team, and enjoyed doing it.

I’ve sort-of abandoned biology here for the time being. I collected some soil samples on an EVA, which will be analyzed in the lab, but I’ve been much more interested in doing practical things around the hab. Being around these engineers has been an inescapable reminder of how much I don’t know.

The Don came to visit us today. It’s supposed to be close to 0 degrees F … and he was wearing short sleeves!

For fun, we’ve been watching Firefly, and having bad pun tournaments. Tonight we’ve opened a new can of worms: rewriting Chuck Norris jokes, replacing Chuck with “The Don” …

More Photos from Mars

Happy new year!

These are, again, poor quality photos. Click to enlarge the image.

early morning hab

sunrise view of the mountains

huge landscape

mesas in the distance

a framed view of Factory Butte

the poop suit

image of the wanning moon (which Derek took with a reg’lar old camera through the eyepiece of the telescope)

headed out on our “rovers”

the hab’s porthole window

Just Like the Little Prince

I enjoy power tools.

Today we began construction of a plywood skirt for the hab. The hab sits on legs, a few feet off the ground, leaving many of the pipes exposed to very cold winds (one cause of our broken toilet, and also several other problems around the hab).

I also enjoy shoveling. Thankfully, I will get to do a lot of this in the next couple days. Each of the boards must sit in a ditch, several inches deep.

I am becoming spoiled by the sky here. Moonrise isn’t until well past 11pm these days, so we enjoy several hours of jaw-dropping stars after the sun sets. I can tell I’ve been hanging out around an astronomer … eight light years is starting to sound like not all that far away.

Interesting space factoid: when galaxies collide, most of the stars don’t even come into contact with each other, because there is so dang much space between them. Our galaxy is scheduled to collide with another galaxy in a couple megayears.

Another interesting space factoid: the International Space Station is orbiting Earth so quickly that you get a sunrise and sunset every 45 minutes or so. It’s just like The Little Prince.

And On the Seventh Day They Rested

…Which is why this post is several hours late. Sorry!

Saturday was our day off. We slept in, played some soccer outside, I made a mold of my hand out of Scotch Tape. Nothing too exciting happened today … except tonight Theresa caught the mouse! He is adorable. We have made a little house for him. We sadly cannot keep him, for tales of Hantavirus in this area of Utah.

Since I don’t have much else to say, let me tell you a little about the hab, and the people who are living in it right now:

The hab is a cylinder, 24 feet wide. Downstairs is the biology/geology lab. Also downstairs are two airlocks and a bathroom (toilet notwithstanding). The staircase up is a strange stairs/ladder hybrid. In the upper half of the hab are the living quarters: kitchen, desk, and six “staterooms.” The staterooms are about four feet wide each … just big enough for my sleeping bag and backpack. The doors of the staterooms are covered in the nameplates of each person who has slept in that room on previous missions (the names are a lot of fun to look through, many of them I know of).

As far as support goes: in Hanksville lives “The Don,” MDRS’s local contact (who brings us emergency supplies if they’re needed). Each night Mission Support checks in online for two hours. Mission Support is comprised of individuals all over the country. At our disposal are an engineering team and a remote science team.

Of course, the most amazing part of this experience has been the chance to live with these five people. Everyone on our crew is under 30 (rare for MDRS), and they all blow me away. You can find their bios on the MDRS website, but here are some things I love about them:

Auvi is from Bangladesh, and one of our crew engineers. He constantly reads operations manuals for various rockets and other machines, builds a new robot almost every day, and claims to get 16 hours of sleep per day when he is at home (wow!). He has a hilariously dry sense of humor.

David is our crew commander, and hails from Toronto, Canada. Currently pursuing an MBA, he is the only one on the crew without a hard sciences background, which has worked out perfectly. He’s wonderful at keeping us active and happy … really cares about the mission and crew, and goes about his job as commander in an impressively subtle and effective manner. He’s also one of the fastest learners I know (us science geeks have been pummeling him with info), and is very good at making very bad puns.

Derek, our executive officer, is also from Canada, and only a year older than I am. My favorite part about him is that he, like me, enjoys setting things on fire. Scratch that, my favorite part is his wonderfully perverse sense of humor. He is a rare combination of very bright engineer and very easygoing … always enthusiastic about whatever needs fixing (for example, he spent hours during the first several days getting the observatory in working order, which previous crews were unable to do).

Jeff, chief engineer, comes from Texas. He has become something of our crew’s human encyclopedia (with an alarming base of knowledge not only in physics, but also biology, chemistry, music, politics … I’m not kidding when I say encyclopedia). Jeff has an uncanny ability with numbers (he knows pi past 200 digits). One day I couldn’t drive to where I wanted to go on an ATV. No problem, he wrote a computer program to get me there. Oh, and he has perfect pitch. Jeff is one of those truly brilliant people, not in a trite way.

Theresa, crew astronomer and only other girl, is currently an undergraduate from Pennsylvania. She cooks us surprisingly delicious things (considering the monotony of our choices in ingredients), has an admirably bold personality, loves Japanese and science fiction like no one I know, and does NaNoWriMo.  She knows a tremendous amount about the night sky, to the point that I’d like to copy and paste that part of her brain onto mine. 

It’s late and I’m sounding cheesy by this point. I’ll try again later to summarize my crew in a less banal manner. They’re a hard group to capture in words.