Weather: Mostly clear, with overcast periods, thunderstorms closer, cooler and sometimes breezy; low 4.6c (40.3 F) high 28.5c (83.3 F), humidity 12% at 5:30 pm.

Crew Physical Status: Okay, but unshaven and needing showers.

Brief Narrative of Today's Results: When we returned from dinner about 930 am, we discovered that Wendy (diesel generator) was offline. Nothing could bring it back, so we shut it down. After a few hours, we restarted the generator, but still it remained out of synch with the inverter.

This morning, still on batteries, we were unable to restart Wendy. We connected a car to the hab battery system, but the car (idling at 2000 rpm)labored in the heat and was not able to keep up with even the minimal hab load.

Meanwhile, we turned off the refrigerators and all unneeded appliances and pumps, running laptops only on batteries. We continued to keep the Crew Activity Analyzer running. Ron, Mike, John, and Maarten were able to continue development work. After our morning meeting, I submitted a revised document with scenarios to demonstrate the system's capabilities, requiring about ten new voice commands.

About 2 pm, we realized that delivery of the replacement generator "ASAP" would not be soon enough. Brent went to town to buy jumper cables, but Hanksville is completely sold out. Next delivery is in two days.

Meanwhile, somebody mentioned the generator at Don's place, which had not registered with me earlier (I had taken it as a joke, I guess, having heard of previous crew's difficulties). Assuming this was the generator (Stan) that was supposed to be delivered, Rick and Paul went to town to get it.

We've been working on Stan for about 3 hours with slow progress -- and at this very moment as I write, we finally got the inverter to synch with Stan. We needed to 1) rewire the connection to the main switch at Wendy (corroded wires), 2) reduce the current draw from the generator to 20 amps (at the inverter, down from 53), 3) throttle up the power on Stan (first turning off the idler), and 4) set the inverter's max threshold input from 132 to 138 volts. As we say in problem solving research, this was a big search space!

Oh, yes, the Wildblue internet connection started working again this morning for no apparent reason than our bare desire.

EVA: No sims.

Plans for Tomorrow: Assuming we have power, begin to document power agent assistance in different work settings.

Report Transmission Schedule:

1. Engineering report (timing unknown, Rick's first)
2. GreenHab report (before dinner)
3, CDR Journal (now)

Inventory: We discovered that mice had eaten into every cellophane package in the pantry. Future crews should be advised to put all such food in the big gray tubs.

Support Requested: Confirmation from Don that we have in fact retrieved Stan and advice about running it (what was wrong that required it to be removed from MDRS? what is likely to go wrong again?).

Miscellaneous: Well, we sure knew what we was doing when we chose MDRS as a setting for agent systems to assist a crew with power failures.

Bill Clancey
Commander, MDRS Crew 49