AustroMars Day 7: Sissi roams the plains of Mars (finally)!

Boy was that a day! It felt like almost like the perfect emotional rollercoaster, as we started to realise with an ever increasing pace that tomorrow the real AustroMars mission will finally start.

In the morning there was this press conference with the Gouvernor of the Austrian federal state of Salzburg, Ms. Gabi Burgstaller. Starting in a friendly atmosphere this event turned into a very emotional one, as friends and family of some crew members said good bye. One could feel the emotions on the other side in the Mission Control Center in Salzburg and this sparked the idea of realism, not only in our minds but also in our hearts.

The next highlight were the first steps of Sissi. After long hours of works during two days and nights, consultations with our Rover experts in Austria, we indentified the error in the rover's power supply. Once we had fixed it, Sissi came alive – step by step of course, as we wanted to make sure that she was doing alright with all of her subsystems. When she finally started to roll on the Martian desert plains it felt like Christmas and Easter – all at once. Two years of hard work had finally substantiated to what we had hoped for!

Now, we are set up for our mission. Minor issues with the experiments are still to be solved but we will do so during the simulation, just as one would expect from real Astronauts en-route to Mars.

So finally the descent engine is all set up to fire, the AustroMars Martian de-orbit countdown sequence is in its final stage!

Signing off for today

Norbert Frischauf
Commander, MDRS Crew 48 "AustroMars"