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 http://zenacardman.com

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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 – [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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