The crew of the Mars Desert Research Station rotates every 2 weeks. These are the scientists and engineers who live and work on site within the MDRS. They explore all of the facets of human exploration in a simulated Mars environment. The MDRS will be active for a 7 month period.

Maximizing the Value of Consumables in Mars Simulation Environment
Maggie Zubrin & Artemis Westenberg

In keeping with the stated purpose of the MDRS as a Mars Simulation Module, Crew 41 will be implementing a study intended to evaluate consumables with respect to various criteria which will be critical on an actual manned mission to Mars. The goal of this study is to arrive at a suggested food plan to be implemented, with variations by future crews at MDRS. In addition to looking at the consumables of the crew, we will endeavor to establish a quick and easy composting system for use with "soil grown" plants in the greenhouse section of the GreenHab, in recognition of the high value of such materials in an actual Mars environment.

Criteria used to evaluate food and other consumables include:

• Meal ingredients should be packed in a form that is low in volume and mass.
• Meal ingredients should require minimum power outlay to store, few foods should require refrigeration.
• Meal preparation should require limited power outlay and measurable and acceptable additional water.
• Ready-to-eat snacks, quick foods and prepared meals should be nutritional and balanced.
• Food should be conducive to crew satisfaction, within the limits of the other criteria.

Presumptions:

• Freeze dried and other foods which do not require refrigeration and which are packed without excess packaging or water be the most likely to fulfill the requirements for low mass/volume and refrigeration requirements.
• Total food volume will not exceed approximately 3 feet wide by 4 feet long by 2 feet high, or roughly the size of a Subaru trunk.
• Ingredients for prepared meals will be measured and logged by the cook as they are used in meal preparation, including added water.
• Snacks and simple preparation meals will be logged by the crewmember as they are consumed and prepared meals will be logged as "dish x" etc. and portions will be noted.
• Subjective notes will be made regarding cooking time and method (unable with present technology to measure power outlay exactly)
• Survey sheet will be prepared upon which crew members will note their response to meal, including categories: taste, full feeling, after effects (gas, heartburn, etc), overall impression, suggestions for improvement.
• Each crew member will be weighed prior to start of kitchen experiment and at the end of the experiment. Crewmembers may keep their weight confidential, as only any change to weight is relevant. Change in weight for each crewmember will be calculated.
• Subjective comments will be gathered at the conclusion of the experiment with respect to overall energy levels, satisfaction with the menu, favorite meals, etc.

In addition, the output of composted tea and compost roughage will be measured prior to application to plants in the greenhouse. At the conclusion of the study, data will be collated and evaluated for both objective and subjective criteria.

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Short Photoperiod Growth of Greenhouse Plants
Penny Boston

January at the MDRS site is close to the minimum photoperiod during the year. Even with a heated greenhouse, the availability of light is potentially a limiting factor in plant production. We are testing several plant varieties in both soil-based and hydroponic growth schemes. This simple demonstration project will assess our general ability to grow and produce at least a modicum of edible material (at least as garnishes!) during this time of year.

For this project, we have brought already sprouted and growing plants. These include 3 week-old, row grown leaf lettuces and romaine that were sprouted in central New Mexico (Socorro) in Rio Grande Rift alluvial soil. Peppergrass, watercress, Persian Garden Cress, and mizuna were sprouted in fine seed starting mix in compressed peat pots. Herb plants (chives, cilantro, mint, and rosemary) were brought as small mature plants.

Some of each plant were repotted today (Jan. 1) using a commercially available potting soil into 4² plastic pots that were already onsite. Some of each plant await transplantation into a hydroponic unit being shipped from Gus Frederick.

Existing water hyacinths (Eichornia crassipes) in the tanks were mostly deceased and decomposing, but some live fragments remained. Dead plant material was removed for the composting effort (see Maximizing the Value of Consumables in a Mars Simulation Environment). The fragments will hopefully begin to regrow. Additionally, actively growing duckweed and Azolla are being shipped in for the hydroponic tanks building on previous MDRS work by Frederick and non-MDRS work on the use of these plants for life support use by Frederick and Boston.

The short duration of crew rotations makes coordination between crews on greenhouse issues critical for any useful plants and data to emerge. This has been a problem in the past. There will be continuity between Mission Crew 41 and the follow on Crew 42 in continuing these experiments.

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Science Mission Objectives:
Penny Boston & Shannon Rupert

Mineral-rich and Evaporite Geomicrobiological Desert Habitats:

The science goals are designed to incorporate the iMAS (Individual Mobile Agents Systems) project described elsewhere. This collaboration between human-centered computing and real field science will benefit both efforts. It will enable a greater degree of systematization to be brought to organizing the science while providing useful human field-testing of the iMAS.

Scientific research for Crew 41 includes continuation of work on the desert varnish coatings in the area and an attempt to map the distribution of halophiles in the vicinity. Additionally, occurrence of surface lichen inhabitants will be noted and mapped. Competition between lichen cover and desert varnish cover has been previously suggested and we will be observing this where possible.

Desert Varnish Studies:

The desert varnish work is a mission simulation continuation of work begun by P. Boston during Crew 6, and continued out of sim with several major field expeditions to the area in 2003 and 2004. The organisms isolated and other samples taken and analyses performed during those expeditions have been worked with extensively in Boston's labs at New Mexico Tech.

To date, we have achieved bacterial production in culture of a number of relevant Mn oxide and Fe oxide minerals, including birnessite and todorokite. Extensive DNA analyses via the screening procedure known as DGGE (Denaturing Gradient Gel Electrophoresis) has given us an overall idea of the biodiversity of organisms that live in, on, and under the varnish coatings from a variety of rock types. Extensive but very thin layers of cyanobacteria underlay the mineral varnish material and appear to be fueling the other microbial and mineral deposit processes. Microcolonial fungi on the surface, in pits, and with filaments penetrating through the varnish layers may be tertiary consumers of primary photosynthate. The photosynthetic productivity of the collective community may be fueling the oxidation reactions occurring in the mineral coating.

Desert varnish coated rocks at MDRS include quartzites, carbonate-cemented sandstones, carbonate marl, and several rarer types. In some cases, entire rock surfaces are darkened by the material. In other cases, spots, stripes, and even dendritic patterns have proven to yield significant biological materials of (especially mineral producers in culture).

Crew 41's effort will involve locating and sampling any additional rock types not previously studied, e.g. cherty layers, silica-cemented sandstones, and others. Sampling tasks include obtaining samples for inoculation into various growth media for live organism isolations, collection of paired samples that are subjected to a sucrose lysis buffer to break open cells and preserve the DNA for later laboratory analyses back on Earth, collection of sterile hand samples for mineralogical analysis via SEM, electron microprobe, XRD, and other techniques.

In our previous work, we have focused on sampling and analyzing rocks with conspicuous desert varnish coatings. This mission will also focus on collecting all rock types sampled but specimens without conspicuously visible varnish. These negative controls will be analyzed identically to the varnish-coated specimens to try to see whether the biological and mineralogical analyses differ between them.

Because of the ambient low temperatures during January, in situ exoenzyme analyses pioneered by Boston would be very difficult to conduct in the field requiring ridiculously long incubation times. Thus, we will collect a series of rocks with good varnish coatings into sterile sample bags for later contact exoenzyme assays conducted in the laboratory.

Further, as a long-term monitoring study, we will select several sites for deployment of sterile but empty Petri plates for long term dust collection studies. One of the questions about desert varnish is how much material is contributed by aerially transported and deposited materials versus those that are leached from the parent rocks. We believe from prior analyses of the elemental chemistry of the bentonite soils that they may be contributing a significant fraction, if not all, of the Mn and Fe compounds that are being acted on by the microbial communities.

Saline Environments and Possible Halophile Habitats:

The occurrence of halite and accompanying saline environments has been noted during previous crew rotations (e.g. Crew 14 and 18). S. Rupert will be leading EVAs to locate, map, and systematically sample the mineral and microbial properties of these sites. We plan to conduct studies on halophile microorganism communities during Crew 41, Crew 42, and Expedition Beta to provide a comprehensive study of their distribution and biodiversity at MDRS.

Evaporite deposits have unique organisms adapted to highly challenging osmotic conditions. Organisms trapped in fluid salt inclusions have been suggested to be of great antiquity. Unique strains have been identified from many evaporite deposits including New Mexico, Austria, and elsewhere. Gypsophilic organisms are often found in association with halophiles. Some halophiles have other properties that fit them for extreme conditions, for example, extreme resistance to ionizing radiation, e.g. Deinococcus radiodurans.

We will perform initial site selection and assessment, take hand samples for mineralogical analyses, and place samples in sucrose lysis buffer for later DNA analysis. Kathy Bywaters (Crew 42) and John Thaler (ExBeta) will continue by culturing samples from these sites in collaboration with Vuong Nguyen (ExOne).

Other Scientific Goals:

An additional goal includes observations of seep communities of cyanobacteria, lichens, and possibly other bacteria. These organisms occur in preferential water paths between bedding planes where the moisture flows out from cliff faces. Possible visible confounding factors include the presence of thin green chlorite layers that can mimic photosynthetic organisms, and black deposits which may be mineral or lichenous. Microbial inspection of materials can aid in a first identification of the nature of such visible layers. We will take live samples in BG-11 cyanobacterial medium, sucrose lysis buffer DNA samples, and hand samples.

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Individual Mobile Agents Systems (iMAS)
Shannon Rupert, Penny Boston, Maarten Sierhuis, Ron Van Hoof, Chin Seah, Brent Garry, & Bill Clancey

One of the ideas to come out of NASA’s Mobile Agents project is that of a "personal" Mobile Agents system for field researchers that is independent of the complex network required by the much larger project previously tested (e.g. by Crews 16, 29 and 38). An Individual Mobile Agent System (iMAS) is a stand-alone system that provides all or most of the capabilities of the full Mobile Agents system with the exception that it runs on one personal computer without the functionality or need of a network Mobile Agents computer. For example, a scientist can take voice notes, download pictures, record sample bags, and associate them together with a single location, which is automatically tracked and later can be mapped by the system. All of this information is stored locally on the machine in a Compendium database, and is not relayed directly through the network as in the full Mobile Agents system.

An individual system such as iMAS could serve a number of purposes in an actual Mars mission, with each astronaut using his or her Personal Agent as an independent field assistant and lab assistant. The agent can monitor a specific EVA activity and could give the scientist advice should he or she forget a task. This advice can be based on a pre-defined "methodology" such as S.E.M.S. (Scouting Exploration Methodology Study) (e.g Crews 21, 25, 30 and Expedition Two). An agent configured to the needs of the individual scientist will allow him or her to create and load an expedition/EVA plan for monitoring individual activities, time and location out in the field. The system has all the individual capabilities of the full Mobile Agents system with the absence of in situ connectivity. All science data can be downloaded to Science Organizer at NASA Ames when the scientist is back in the Hab and connected to the network, making the data available for analysis by both the astronaut and remote scientists. The remote science team (RST) members can in turn have their own personal agents with the ability to transfer the data into a more appropriate tool that allows for greater science data analysis capabilities, although this capability is not available at this time.

In addition, in the future the Personal Agents of either astronaut or remote scientist could both create requests for future EVAs and those requests can be integrated into an EVA planning and scheduling system. This system can provide EVA schedules for different time intervals (daily, weekly, etc.) and eliminate the need for separate RST and crew meetings to plan EVAs. Such meetings can be a challenge in terms of creating an updated plan in a timely manner. We believe, based on our past field tests at MDRS, that a system like this would result in increased science return during EVAs.

What we have outlined above is too complicated for the first phases of the project. As a first attempt, a prototype of the iMAS system will be tested during our rotation. The iMAS system is comprised of the same Dell 400 laptops used by the astronauts in the Mobile Agents project, two GPS units with NMEA strings, two digital cameras with USB cables and headsets used to communicate with the agents. iMAS has been simplified to make startup and configuration easier than with the full system. iMAS auto-loads a default EVA plan from Compendium containing three activities, Egress, WorkAtWorkSite1 and Ingress with a total duration of 2.5 hours (configured to be the same as the expected runtime of the laptops). The Egress and Ingress activities last 15 minutes and the science activity is 2 hours long. Furthermore, iMAS integrates the GPS device with the system instead of as a separate component, thus reducing the start-up steps from 6 to 4. It also reduces the memory footprint required by iMAS. Unlike Mobile Agents, iMAS does not support any collaborative features such as sharing and distribution of science data between astronauts, rovers, etc. Additionally, in its current configuration iMAS will only store science data in Compendium, while the full Mobile Agents system also transmits the science data for storage in Science Organizer and for distribution via e-mail.

In addition to the two Dell systems described above, we have an iBook G4 laptop that is loaded with Compendium. We will use this computer to create Compendium maps of sites of interest to the halophile study. These locations will then be revisited and used as halophile study sites by Kathy Bywaters (Crew 42) and John Thaler (Expedition Beta). This will allow us to test the workability of cross-crew collaboration.

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Occupational Psychosocial Factors in Mars Analogue Environments

William Fung-Schwarz (Crew 33)

Background/Aims: The aim of this study is to explore the effects of a ground-based simulated space mission (called an analogue environment or simulation) on the day-to-day psychosocial "factors" of volunteer crewmembers.

Because the analogue simulation is an isolated and confined setting, factors (stress, small shared living areas, close interaction with fellow crewmembers, and continuous confinement to the habitat) may significantly influence both work and personal life. These "occupational psychosocial factors" are the focus of this investigation. Because crewmembers are both working and living in the same space, factors that do not usually affect work performance or job satisfaction become more important. The overall climate of work safety is critical for job performance and optimal functioning. Understanding how crewmembers cope in an isolated work environment assists with enhanced overall functioning. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate changes over time in crewmembers' stress, coping, and functional health in an analogue environment. Furthermore, this study will investigate all types of coping including the following: problem-focused coping, intimacy-seeking coping, emotion-focused coping, and spiritual-focused coping.

Setting: During 2-week rotations at an analogue environment, 6-7 member volunteer crews will complete space simulations. At these "lessons learned" laboratories, crewmembers complete a variety of industry and academic sponsored physical and biological research studies. This study, "Occupational Psychosocial Factors in Mars Analogue Environments" is one of many on-going studies at the analogue environment. Currently there are two analogues (both owned and operated by the non-profit organization called the Mars Society):

1. Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), which operate from November 31-May 31 each year, is located in Hanksville, Utah
   
   
2. The Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS), which operates from July 1-31 each year, is located on Devon Island, Canada

Methods: Study data collection methods will include: repeated measures computerized surveys (with paper/pencil backups), focus group discussions, group sharing activities, and semi-structured interviews. Additionally, a retrospective content analysis of past crewmember reports will be completed. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis will occur with data generated in this study. The principal investigator (who will be participating in the crew rotation with participants) will have responsibility of data collection and analysis.

Significance: Having a thorough, evidence-based knowledge of psychosocial occupational hazards in Mars analogues may be significant in understanding future Mars crews. Additionally, lessons learned from Mars analogue research may be important in establishing translational research to facilitate coping in families in remote communities, public service personnel, military troops, incarcerated populations, isolated elderly citizens, chronically ill individuals, or disabled persons.