2006-03-18, 2132h MST

Well, it's spring break 2006, so I got on a plane to Hawaii. When I step outside my quarters sand gets in my shoes and beautiful cloud formations litter the horizon. I'm living with four girls and only one other guy -- this will be an awesome spring break!

Sounds like the average college-aged spring break, right? But I'm afraid "MTV Spring Break" won't be coming here, nor will "Girls Gone Wild" -- maybe "Nerds Gone Wild" though: I'm living in a simulated Martian Habitat called the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS).

But wait a second: what happened to the sandy beaches of Hawaii and a week-long festival of debauchery? Well, I didn't do the lying -- that was your imagination at work! The plane I was on from Atlanta was on its way to Hawaii, but we (MDRS Crew 47) got off in Salt Lake City and drove 5 hours south into the Utah desert -- the closest town is Hanksville, UT (think of 2-3 buildings within 100 feet of each other, not Evanston). The four girls are school mates of mine at the Georgia Institute of Technology: Meryl Mims, Emily Colvin, Jenny Rome and Anne Campeau. My graduate research advisor, Dr. Jan Osburg, is the other guy on the trip and he is our Crew Commander.

There's a barren beauty to the Utah desert landscape that lends itself well to the simulated Martian environment. Well-known images of Mars show a barren red-rocked landscape and some shots of this region of the Utah desert could stand in as stunt doubles any day for their Martian counterparts. Usually, popular culture images of the desert elicit sun-beating heat that makes you sweat while watching it in a movie or reading about it in a book, but the Utah desert is cold in March. The cold desert reported by the Viking Landers and the Mars Rovers is the motivation for choosing this region of Utah as a place to establish the MDRS.

But we're not camping out every night. Instead, we're living in a two-story tuna-can-shaped building (the Hab) with all the merchandise of Nerds 'R Us inside: computers, power meters, radiation detectors, GPS devices and more. This is certainly going to be a spring break of debauchery -- but a debauchery of the mind, and the imagination, as each one of us thinks and dreams of how we're contributing to Mankind's inevitable expansion into the solar system and beyond.

Should I have stayed on the plane heading to Hawaii? Only time will tell, but 'what happens in MDRS stays in MDRS' -- well, almost.

2006-03-19, 1644h MST

Just like the horse and saddle fed the transportation needs of the American frontier in the Old West, there will be a similar form of individualized transportation to allow future explorers to cover alien terrain. In fact, the Apollo missions of the 1960's and early 70's took the first steps to individualize transportation with the moon buggy trips. But to comedian Jerry Seinfeld, the Apollo moon buggy trips only proved the male obsession with driving: we flew over 100,000 miles in a spaceship and what did we do? We drove around.

Well, women's lib has taken some bold steps both in the workplace and in politics since the Apollo days, so why not in the driving obsession? On Crew 47, the ratio of women to men is 2:1 and part of Day 2 training was learning how to use the All-Terrain Vehicles (ATVs), which will be our simulated Martian buggies. In fact the women were becoming so adept at driving the ATVs that after becoming lost they refused to stop to ask for directions: women's lib has achieved its pinnacle of accomplishment!

ATV training continued throughout the afternoon while rain storms could be seen off in the distance. While today we were the Riders on the Storm, the day after tomorrow is our first day of full simulation ('sim') so stay tuned for the time to Break on Through -- the other side awaits.

Jason Sherwin, PAO
MDRS Crew 47