Today is half-way day. Hard to believe that we already spent a week here, but equally hard to believe that it has only been a week - our productivity so far has been way above even our most optimistic predictions.

The day started with a brief Easter service for those wishing to attend. This being a holiday and everything, the official wake-up time had been set to 0900h. After a leisurely breakfast, half of the crew went on a strenuous EVA while the other half dealt with the no less challenging task of getting the balloon and climber robot ready for launch tomorrow. Both efforts succeeded. Late lunch consisted of sandwiches and chips, in order to leave space for tonight's Easter feast - a delicious roast was acquired for that purpose in Salt Lake City and was masterfully prepared by Doug. Part of the crew took the afternoon off from mission-related activities since they have the deadline for their senior design project approaching, and what better place to design spacecraft than on simulated Mars!

As I was plotting today's GPS data, it occurred to me that the extensive navigation and GPS tracking effort linked to our EVAs has allowed us to determine that the main dirt road leading past the hab - "Cow Dung Road" going south and "Lowell Highway" going north - is plotted incorrectly on the 20-year-old USGS maps that every crew has been using. With the help of our mission support center in Atlanta, we hope to be able to map the current course of that traverse, and we also hope to have the time to do additional long-range EVAs for surveying and mapping "Copernicus Highway" along Skyline Rim.

Last night we started watching another apropos movie: Dune, in the strange-but-fascinating SciFi Channel version produced in 2000. Motivated by today's EVA through the barren wastelands east of the hab, we will definitely continue to follow this five-hour epos about survival on a mysterious desert planet (even though parts of the landscape we traversed today rather reminded me of "Planet P" so I kept an eye out for any flying bugs ;-)

Signing off for today,

Jan Osburg
Commander, MDRS Crew 37