Saturday, March 27, 2010

Day 6

Good morning from the red planet! It is beautiful and sunny out- the rain has gone and it is looking like it will even get up to 60 today! Jessica has dubbed today "breakfast day" since the only meal we all really enjoy out here is breakfast. It doesn't taste freeze-dried and isn't rubbery. I'm a total fan of this idea and will get started on it soon.

Yesterday I declared the day "homework day" and I spent the morning writing a senior design report and the afternoon studying for a history test that I am missing this coming Tuesday. The crew has gotten into the series "Firefly" as we are all Joss Whedon fans...so I had to fit in a few of those episodes too. :)

Billy headed down to engineering in the early afternoon and put together the rover. She's looking good. We had some unfortunate news come from Dan, as he had gone out to check the voltage on the battery that I was using in my repeater station...the winds had gotten up to 30 mph and our solar panel had blown over and cracked. Luckily, the voltage coming off the panel was normal, and it is just cosmetic damage...but mission support obviously doesn't like to hear these things. Dan's rotten luck continued when he went on a turbine EVA with Jessica and Eric...one of the main components failed. He came in, looking pretty disheartened. So is life out here. Things are up in the air, and failures occur daily. It is the kind of challenge we engineers really enjoy. We are typically the crew that comes out and fixes everything, so mission support has no issue with us. I'm hoping we can keep that reputation this year, especially since I'm planning to be Commander next year.

Also not functioning- two of the backpacks. Chris, Dan and Eric spent some time soldering the fuse and both seemed to kick back on. We still are having issues with one of the helmets- when Chris was on an EVA, the bowl actually came loose of the base and he was exposed to air- hence, he died on the surface of Mars that day. Hopefully we can continue to get them working.

A non cooking day- I rehdyrated some mountain chili and sierra chicken. It wasn't great, but it was edible. 5 days until burgers and milkshakes. 7 days until a real shower! While I will be so happy to get back to regular meals, I really will miss the time out here. We ended the evening by playing some paperclip poker and watching firefly again. Off to go enjoy the day!

Plans for today:

Breakfast day!
Radio coverage EVA and mapping EVA
History
Turbine fixing

Quotes:
"I'm pushing all the buttons I have"-Dan
"Jilllllian!"- Chris, everytime the firefly discs skipped
"I was going to steam roll him, but then I got too lazy"- me

Check out Billy's picasa pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/bjg222

Jillian
Crew 93-XO

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