Water on Mars? No problem! As the AustroMars flight crew arrived around 9:00 at the Habitat, it was rather clear that this day would be centered around internal activities. Winds were rather stormy - the Mars Society flag waved heavily in the winds - and on top it started to rain heavily from time to time.

Luckily we had enough to do inside the hab; while cleaning may not be the most interesting activity after all, it is absolutely essential when living so close together. Beside house keeping, which - has a very positive side effect - led to an excellent display of Martian cuisine, we did a lot of preparatory activities, centrecenterede MedMars Monitoring experiment as well as the AustroMars Rover.

The MedMars Experiment objective is to obtain medical data during the EVA, by measuring body core temperature, heart beat rate, as well as humidity and temperature in the astronaut's helmet.

The AustroMars Rover - friendly dubbed "Sissy", the only female crew member of AustroMars. - was another center of attention of today. In a 6.5 hour continuous teleconference with the engineers and rover specialists at the AustroMars Mission Control Center (MCC) in Salzburg, "Sissy" was put into action. Not an easy task, as the Rover is supposed to drive through the Utah landscape, entirely remote controlled from the MCC, via satellite link.

Sissy is the outcome of a one-year school project with an Austrian technical college and was constructed with the help of experts from the Austrian Space Forum and the European Space Agency. The AustroMars mission will be the ultimate baptism of fire for Sissy's performance - and today we wanted to make sure that the whole-year effort of the school pupils will achieve the well deserved results. It was not easy: WLAN outages, power problems and software troubles let us live through an emotional roller coaster between depression and euphoria, but at the end, Sissy performed well (for a beginning). Telemetry was there, camera pictures as well, and the solar panels provided for enough power. Tomorrow we will have to fix the "minor" issue of getting Sissy to accept drive commands, but after today we are very optimistic that we can tweak the rover's on-board data handling system to enable that as well.

The day was finally concluded with a dress rehearsal of the EVA suit donning procedure, which is beefed up to a normal one, because of our MedMars equipment. After all these tasks the crew is rather exhausted, but we will enjoy our fifth day at the MDRS with a nice common dinner, knowing that some of the excellent food from lunch is still left over...

Signing off for today

Norbert Frischauf
Commander, MDRS Crew 48 "AustroMars"