It looks a little bit scary if you would not be trained for that: trusting your life - not just in sim, but also in reality - to a set of ropes, carabiners, pro-traction units and a inverted "V" made of 2-3 meter long carbon fibre poles standing in the soil solid like a rock, called the "Biped". What's happening? Today we had our mountaineering rescue exercise involving 5 EVA crewmembers under the guidance of our MSL Markus Spiss, who is a certified mountain rescue instructor - anyone other we would not have trusted our lives when operating the "Biped", which is a state-of-the-art technology being used in alpine emergencies since two years and which has now found its way to the aerospace sector as of today.

Due to a scouting mission in the preparatory week we have found an excellent proving ground involving a 12 m high vertical wall going down in a fantastic canyon trench northeast of the research station: the assumption was that during a geological EVA one of the EVA crewmembers stumbles and slips down the wall and falls on sand-soft soil: the spacesuits personal life support system (the "backpack" - providing air, communication, water and power) protects the spine of the patient very well. I personally believe if the patient suffers a serious back injury, the PLSS would be dead as well, probably leading to a suffocation, so one can have a good chance of having only a minor back trauma as long as the PLSS is intact. The part of the body which is hardly protected is the neck, where the deceleration of the head might easily cause neck trauma. In our case we assumed further, that the patients head crushed against the backpart of the helmet leading to a skull trauma causing to a slowly develloping subarachnoidal hemorraghia (that is a bleeding in the brain and e.g. may lead to a slow loss of consciousness and lack of breathing in worst cases).

The usual procedure is to lower down the paramedic to the patient in the first minutes to start assessement and treatment on-site, whilst the rest of the Crew starts building up the Biped which is being used for lifting up the patient. Via a 1:4 cable winch, two people are able to easily pull up the 100+ kg patient, in this case our Executive Officer Alexander Soucek, and yours truly Health and Safety Officer as the EMT.

In addition to that, we had prepared a "net-stretcher", which is an absolutely light-weighted construction made out of a long rope which resembles a fishernet, where four people are able to easily carry a patient for several hundred meters with hardly any exhaustion (very, very much unlike our carrying ops two days ago in our other rescue exercise).

In summary, using mountaineering medical know-how is a huge advantage because there are so many similarities between Mars-analogue operations and high mountain rescue, like long response times, thermal problems shifting the prognosis of the patient, the need for light-weight and cleverly constructed hardware and many other border conditions. I am pretty confident that on a real Mars mission, climbing in steep terrain will be too dangerous, to be carried out on the first landings, but inevitably it will come, and the more astronauts spend taking geological surveys e.g. in the Vallis Marineris, the more likely they are to be subject to such accidents. Having a set of countermeasures and treatment experiences at hand may one day save lives on Mars - and that is reason for us enough to lower oneself down on a set of thin ropes down a steep canyon wall here at the Mars Desert Research Station.

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Personal HSO Report:

Today - besides the great rescue exercise - was a day devoted to psychological sciences as we, four times during the mission, are being asked to spend about 2 hours in front of the computers filling out quesstionaires about our social structure and personal well being. We are taking part in a study from Sheryl Bishop from the University of Texas at Galveston, but in addition the crew is also subject of study for a research project at the University of Innsbruck's Institute of Psychology, specialising on crowding and other stress issues. Plus, not being satisfied by being probed by two universities, we also take part in a study for the Fatigue Monitoring System which is tracking our eyeball movement, the pupillomyograph from the Medical University of Innsbruck, plus filling out questionnaires about our sleepiness perceptions using the Stanford Sleepiness Scale.

In addition, we are expecting extensive post-flight debriefing interviews *sigh*. Yes, we are fully compliant and happy to be subject of research, and on some days I am quite astounded how many experiments one can carry out on a single human being - that must be just as the astronauts feel in biomedical research missions in the Shuttle or so. The good news is, that one learns a lot about himself: we are eager to learn about the results of these studies and how we are perceived by peoples outside. Above this, we are very grateful for the psychological support, the back-seat team at Mission Control gives us: it is not that we are not able to handle the confined space, the tight flight plan and such a fairly high pressure to perform well, also for the many people who made this mission possible, but mainly to make sure, that a professional relationsship between the flight crew, MCC and On-Site support and the back-seats is being kept. After all, we are humans, and humans make mistakes which lead to tensions, especially when there is a) no real-time communication and b) the flow of information is sparse, especially when there is a satellite outage as we are experiencing is regularily here at the station (so for AustroMars it really paid of to have a redundant satellite communication link, which is also having a fairly good link-rate).

Signing off for today, HSO