MDRS Crew 13
February 2 to February 15, 2003

The crew of the Mars Desert Research Station rotates every 2 weeks. These are the scientists and engineers who live and work on site within the MDRS. They explore all of the facets of human exploration in a simulated Mars environment. The MDRS will be active for a 7 month period.

Name	Speciality
Klaus Totzek	Commander
Heike Wierzchowski	GreenHab Coordination
Sigrid Belzer	Geology Team
Dr. Patrick Diel	MDRS Observatory Coordinator
Horst Gehrmann	Health & Safety Officer
Tom Dirlich	Media Contact

Klaus Totzek	Crew 13 Mission Commander Klaus Totzek is an architect, member of the board of the German Mars Society and a member of the American institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Just like Dr. Diel he is a hobby astronomer at the "Physikalischen Verein" Frankfurt am Main. He conducts the interior design together with the other members of the team for the European Mars analogous station. In addition he supports the interdisciplinary outline at the technical university of Darmstadt for a Mars habitat. He will conduct the tests with a balloon and will serve as Commander of the MDRS - D1 mission and as engineer on board.
Heike Wierzchowski	Heike Wierzchowski is a graphic designer, member of the German Mars Society and will serve as the first officer of the mission. She will continue the study of Bill Clancey of the NASA Ames Research centre which was started during the 5th rotation. It is all about the optimization of workflows and the design of habitats. In addition she will be responsible for the greenhouse together with Horst Gehrmann.
Sigrid Belzer	Sigrid Belzer is a geologist of the Technical University of Darmstadt. She will manage the geological projects of the team. There she is responsibly for up to 3 meters deep drillings and all other geological research onboard the MDRS.
Dr. Patrick Diel	Dr. Patrick Diel is biologist in Cologne at the German University of Physical Education. In his leisure time he deals with astronomy and he is member of the "Physikalischen Verein" in Frankfurt am Main too. He will carry out DNA tests for the check of a possible contamination of rocks by the astronauts. In addition, he supervises the physical constitution of all crewmembers during EVA. Due to his personal interest he will be responsible for the observatory onboard the MDRS.
Horst Gehrmann	H.G. Ewers alias Horst Gehrmann works as a science author and is known also as an author of the science fiction novel Perry Rhodan. Among other things he has a medical and astronomical education and is interested in botany. Therefore he will conduct our medical tests and is responsible for the greenhouse. In addition he will execute measures of UV-radiation. This is part of a preparatory test for a later mission on the MDRS from Dr. Petra Rettberg. She works for the German space agency (DLR), institutes of aerospace medicine, radiation biology section, Cologne. Horst Gehrmann is also member of the German Mars Society.
Tom Dirlich	Tom Dirlich is finishing his architecture studies at the TU Munich. Since many years he has been working in several different projects at the department of space engineering at the TU Munich. His main point of interest is in the development of habitability items, products for the daily life in space, for manned space missions. During his work with the German Mars Society he has developed a concept design of a Habitat for EXtreme Environments (HExE) and is working on the design of the crew quarters for the Euromars project. Together with the company Vontana Industrie, producers of the TASSO waterbeds, he developed a new sleep restraint system for the ISS and tested it together with NASA octobre 1999 in a parabular flight campaign. Vontana plans to develop a sleepsystem for manned mars missions and thus continuing the successful work of the last years. For the coming MDRS-D1-Mission the Vontana will provide several different prototypes of a marsbed. Tom will set up these at the MDRS and will conduct a number of tests on optimizing the sleep quality.