As this was a day without any EVA or dangerous EVA business, the probability for medical incidences was truly low. The crew is in good health and has even managed to improve their fluid intake to above 2 litres per day as a consequence of a constant reminder from our beloved flight surgeons in the Mission Control Center.

Today's main and only health concern is the amount of time Hutti (C. Hutsteiner, FE) and Markus (M. Spiss, MSL) are spending in the Greenhab due to a water pump failure. It is on the one hand very impressive to observe these masters of improvisation when they build a nuclear reactor from a piece of a wood and a wire, but on the other hand they are working in a septic environment. Thanks to the training of our MSL, the risk of cross-contaminating the crew with the plethora of bacteria cultures flourishing in the Greenhab is rather low, but still we have to observe a number of basic rules. Amongst them is a strict wash&desinfect-your-hands-afterwards policy and the rule that the people working in the Greenhab shall not prepare the food for that day. (On a side note, Markus made a remark, that by working in the Greenhab he would be able to avoid any cooking duty was commented by a strange "we'll-see"-look by the rest of the crew ;-))

On a real mission it is also to be expected, that astronauts might deal with septic environments: the experiences on space station MIR have shown us, that even a "sterile" masterpiece of engineering floating in orbit is not protected from very earthly germs which also pose a threat to computer equipment.

Learning to live with these blind passengers is also something we do here at the station therefore adding a biological component to the research going on here. Hence, we are also very much looking forward to the incubator operations, as our MSL has put several sterile agar plates across the hab to study the microbiological burden on men and machinery. In a few days we'll know more...

Signing off, yours truly
Gernot Groemer, HSO

---

HSO Personal Report

Finally, after 6 days of mission operations, we got a free 4 hours spare time slot for (nearly) each of us, which was spent in various ways. I for myself enjoyed writing the first private email to my girlfriend, having a short one-way communication with the MCC (which finally got the absolutely cool offical MCC-AustroMars Polo shirts - they really look great from what we can tell via the web cams).

A group of visitors among others from the Salzburg amateur astronomical society were present, and I even saw my father pop up in the web cam of the MCC - and, best of all, I was told that my girlfriend would be on MCC duty during the upcoming weekend. Unfortunately, in the low-profile shifts, when we are sleeping between 07:00 and 13:00 MCC time, when only the Flight Director, CapCom, Flight Surgeon are on duty and the rest of the team, including the back-seat teams are on stand-by (but it is very, very nice and comforting to know that people are watching who you know very well).

Another very nice thing was to take a closer look to the web casts of the TV productions which have been aired so far: we didn't expect so much publicity over such a long period of time. Yes, we are running a web-log on the internet-sites of the Austrian broadcasting corporation, but our (nearly) daily video logs are being put on the web as video -on demand on the Bayern Alpha website, a tech-science and cultural TV channel, airing in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In addition four provinces of Austria (Tirol, Vienna, Styria and Salzburg) have shown several-minutes contributions in their news, most of which we can see via web cast a few hours afterwards. The funniest part is always reading the web entries of people commenting the video-messages.

We heard that the Salzburg AustroMars-related Yuri's Night Party attracted 100 people, which is a nice success, given the rather (size-wise) moderate location. Besides this, we did some clean-up in the Hab, fixing many small things which were not vital to mission success and there were postponed, but having a working power supply for ones own laptop definitely makes our lives easier.

Signing off, yours truly

Gernot Gröemer, HSO