MDRS Crew 18
April 26 to May 10, 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
Brent Bos	Commander
Petra Rettberg	Chief Biologist & Executive Officer
Joan Roch	Chief Hab Engineer & Musk Observatory Coordinator
Dave Scott	Chief Geologist & Health and Safety Officer
Simone Kosol	Biologist & Water Officer
Elia Husiatynski	Biologist & GreenHab Coordinator
Mark Moran	Hab Engineer

Brent Bos	Crew 18 Mission Commander Brent Bos is currently pursuing his lifelong interest in space exploration working as a physicist for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Most of his current research is in support of the James Webb Space Telescope project. At NASA he also devotes time to Mars exploration, primarily in the area of instrumentation. His passion for Mars really began in earnest when he entered graduate school and joined the Imager for Mars Pathfinder team at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Graduate school is also the place where he first became involved with the Mars Society and the Devon Island project. He served as a Phase 3 crewmember on the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station during its first summer of operation in 2001 and began to realize the unique research opportunity the Mars stations represent. His primary motivation for leading this simulation is to begin to understand the engineering challenges Martian dust will pose to a manned Mars lander mission.
Dr. Petra Rettberg	Dr. Petra Rettberg is a biochemist working at the DLR in Germany. She is the team leader of the photo- and exobiology working group. Her main research interests focus on the adaptation of life to extreme environmentalconditions, especially to UV radiation. At the MDRS she investigates the UVfiltering effect of natural soils.
Joan Roch	Joan Roch has a bachelor in engineering physics and material. Currently, Joan works as a Java programmer and system administrator in Montreal. He recently started a continuous education program in journalism and now plans on gradually shitfting his professional occupation to science popularization. Joan is on "Mars" right now because he believes in the future of any space program that would be bold enough to go for the Red Planet right now. Having the opportunity to actually be involved in some Mars simulation simply couldn't be missed!
Dave Scott	Dave Scott is a field geologist from the University of Toronto, with experience in mapping, archeology, soil sampling, prospecting, research and geophysics. He has worked in numerous remote terraines, from northern Nevada to the Northwest Territories, using various field tools ranging from real-time differential GPS, to time-domain super conductor electromagnetic systems. His hobbies include soccer, camping and carving, and ever since he started playing with Space Lego (1979), he has wanted to be an astronaut.
Simone Kosol	Simone Kosol is a student of biology/genetics at at the University of Salzburg, Austria. She is interested in astro-/exobiology. She likes travelling and riding motorbikes or ATVs. Simone is the water-officer and biologist of Crew 18. She will be doing some exposure studies together with Elia. She will expose Haloarcheae in liquid cultures and salt crystals to see what the environment of the desert does to them. She also would like to take soil samples and analyze them for halophile microorganisms.
Elia Husiatynski	Elia Husiatynski is a student of genetics and molecular biology at the Paris-Lodron-Universitat in Salzburg, Austria. He is also working as member of the security crew in the Rockhouse Salzburg. His main interests are adaption and reactions of microorganisms to extreme environments, especially the martian. In his spare time he likes to go offroad- and mountainbiking and to train wing chun. The experiments conducted here will be: first an exposure experiment with liquid cultures of three strains of haloarchaea. The three strains are dried on glassslides in their media and exposed to the local environment under different conditions and in different locations for the whole duration of the crew 18 rotation and also one of these strains is exposed to the environment as liquid culture in plastic tubes for differing durations in the same locations under the same conditions as the samples on glass slides. second there is a sampling series planned with the objective of analyzing the samples for the abundance of halophiles. The focus on halophilic microorganisms is chosen because these have better chances to live (and not only survive) under martian environmental conditions, than non-halotolerant organisms, due to the broader temperature range high salt concentrations offer for liquid water.
Mark Moran	Mark Moran began his career with a bachelors degree in Aerospace Engineering. He originally wanted to do research in biomedical engineering but ended up there, and worked for 8 years as a civilian at Pax River for Navy military aircraft. He helped write and debrief pilots on flight test plans, as well as supported avionics work. Later he worked as a subcontractor (Wyle Labs) for the space station program. He took an opportunity to earn a masters degree in biostatistics in 1998. On MDRS 18, he has two projects. Through Dr. Gil Levin, who designed the Labelled Release experiments on Vikings I and II, he connected with Dr. Miller and Dr. Kral. He convinced a company in Idaho named AMS Inc. to provide us a soil drill (similar to what could be used to dig through regolith on Mars) and a gas vapor probe for detecting anaerobic methanogens (or more precisely, to detect their methane outgassings) from the deeper soil. A second experiment he's doing is a device which detects contaminants in water samples. The detector has a sensor device which consists of several emitters which can also act as detectors. The sensor is immersed in a small cup of water (after rinsing in distilled water or 70% concentration rubbing alcohol) and then emits one of the detectors and uses a different one as the detector. Later, the data and at least several of the water samples will be sent back to the lab in Texas. The numbers will be used to set the weights on ("train") an artificial neural net which will predict contamination.