The crew have been working so hard over the past several days that only one member has had time for a sponge bath, and it has started to get to people. This being Sunday, I decided to set aside some time this morning before EVA to give everyone time to wash. Unfortunately we discovered that our water reserve tank was empty, (we are still on a once-through water system - our recycler won’t become operational until our greenhouse comes on line in March) leaving us with only 11 gallons left in the hab. I contacted Mission Support to reach our support person in Hanksville to come out and fill the reserve, but as there was no telling when this might occur, the sponge baths had to be cancelled, and we went to the paper plates to cut the need for washing water to a minimum.

The upside of this was that it saved time. So we planned an ambitious EVA. The mission was to penetrate the ridge line of steep hills that runs north-south just west of the hab to be able to explore the large region of uninhabited land that lies between this local ridge and the even higher Skyline Rim that also runs north-south a further 3 kilometers west. The EVA team consisted of Troy Wegman (a biologist), Jennifer Heldmann (a geologist), and Heather Chluda (an aerospace engineer), with Heather in command. Their instructions were not only to try to find or force a pass into the region between the two ridges, but to map the route with a series of UTM gridded waypoints with verbal descriptions, photographs, and, where appropriate, samples assigned to each. The idea is to create a guidebook to the area for the crew rotations that will follow us, so that anyone looking at our documentation would be able to know the character of the terrain around dozens of waypoints throughout the region.

The team left the hab a bit after noon and stayed out for almost six hours. While they were away, I acted as hab capcom and worked at improving our satellite internet connection, with some success. It seems that not all of the problems with the communication system is caused by Starband. A significant number of difficulties were being caused by a program called Webring that someone in one of the shakedown crews had loaded in the hab communication computer in a futile effort to make a webcam work. Webcam or no, Webring was acting as a computer vampire, sucking the life out of other applications. It also had distributed itself around the system, allowing parts of its program to continue to disrupt computer operations guerilla style even after I deleted its main folder. It took hours to hunt down and wipe out. Whoever wrote that software should be sent to Venus.

While I was enjoyably engaged with Webring, Steve McDaniel, the other member of the crew who stayed in the hab, conducted lab analysis of the biological samples collected during yesterday’s EVA. He imaged the samples at magnifications as high as 1000 times. The samples proved to be sublithic bacteria – exactly the type of organisms that some researchers believe could conceivably exist on Mars.

Lamont, our friend from Hanksville, came out during the mid afternoon with a full replacement water tank. In addition to working construction jobs for a living, Lamont is also a 20 veteran of serious fossil hunting. I showed him the possible dinosaur bone fossil I found yesterday. He confirmed it to be a dinosaur bone, probably a vertebrae. After the sim, I will bring it back to Denver for further identification by an expert at the museum.

Communication with the EVA team stopped after 3:46 PM. this did not worry me excessively. There is rough topography around here that can cause radio cutoffs. However, when 5:30 rolled around and it began to darken, I became concerned. We are close to New Moon and there is no light pollution here, so when it gets dark it gets really dark. GPS could provide the crew the direction back towards the hab, but if they were caught in total darkness in rough terrain they would have great difficulty proceeding. Fortunately, at 5:50 Heather checked in, and they made it back – just barely – by nightfall.

When they came through the lock, they seemed both exhausted and exhilarated. It was obvious that it had been a great EVA. They had bags of fossil mollusks (lower Cretaceous oysters!) and other samples, and reams of data. Best of all, they had found a passage through the ridge. It’s a rough trail, but well worth travelling. We’ve named it the Chluda Pass. The EVA team wrote up an extensive report.

Our plan for tomorrow is a very long distance motorized EVA. We will go through the Chluda Pass, then head north until we get to a flash flood channel called the Coal Mine Wash. We will then attempt to follow the Coal Mine Wash west to break through the Skyline Rim to reach the huge area of Cretaceous marine sediments around the rock formation known as Factory Butte.

It’s a very ambitious plan, requiring over 40 km of round trip EVA travel. But everyone is healthy and morale is high. This is an excellent crew. We are going to try.