Crew Status: The crew is in good spirits and ready for Martian action.

Daily Recap: We awoke at 0600 and performed our first official task: Refueling the China Special diesel generator. After that, we had a simple breakfast, and saw off the remaining members of Crew 27. The day was occupied with unpacking and general organizational activities. The Hab was cleaned and vacuumed, and the lab area squared away. We also conducted a series of refresher training activities with ATV and radio operations. The data acquisition computer was setup in the lab area, and configured for use.

On Saturday, Jim Russell from Crew 27 presented me with a Hobo Pro temperature and humidity datalogger that he found outside near the Hab storage depot. As a test of the newly setup data computer, I downloaded the data and discovered that logging was initiated on January 5, 2003 with an interval of 30 minutes. This allowed the logger to capture over 400 days of outside temperature, humidity and dew point information. The memory filled up and stopped logging at 10:30 on March 21 of this year -- a nice sampling of over a year's worth of climate information at the MDRS. This data can be downloaded as a 2.6 mb Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with line graph here.

I reset the logger to record at an interval of 10 minutes, and placed it near the ceiling of in the second floor of the hab, dead-center above the smoke detector. I plan to let it run for our entire rotation to gauge temperature and humidity changes within the Hab's living quarters, and then re-set it for outside logging.

I also initiated logging with my personal Hobo 4-channel temperature logger, and placed it in the GreenHab, to record temperature within the North end "greenhouse" section to record temperature at the top, mniddle and floor levels of the structure, as well as a reading outside for control. I plan to run this for several days to evaluate temperature flux within that section of the GreenHab.

Tomorrow's Plan: Continue with our pre-sim training, involving a basic lesson in orienteering by our resident GPS expert, Steve Featherstone and basic Mars Suit preperation. We also plan to setup and start the salad machine hydroponic systems, with seeds sprouted on Saturday.

Also, tomorrow evening will be our Yuri's Night celebration, (more details forth coming).

Daily Reports: The following reports should be in by 21:00.

1. Commander's Check In (this report) -- Gus Frederick
2. Journalist Report -- Steve Featherstone
3. GreenHab Report -- Kathleen Johnson
4. Engineering Report -- Gregorio Drayer & Alyssa Rzeszutko