We woke today to an odd sound: silence.

I lay in bed for a few minutes savoring the quiet. If I listened really hard, I could hear the faint creaking of the Hab as the sun began to warm it. This was delightful, to awaken interrupted only by my own thoughts. Our daily chatter and clatter always take place with a background of droning motors-the backup generator, which we turn off at night, and the Mars Rover generator, which runs all the time to keep the lab refrigerator going. Last night we had let the Rover generator take a rest from its labors, so it wasn't running when we woke up.

When I first came to the Hab, I was unprepared for the fact that Mars would be a noisy place. We can get away from the droning, of course, by going out on EVAs, but then the droning of the generators is replaced by the humming of the air supply to the helmets. The rest of the time, we hear the noise of the generators. So waking up to silence is a real pleasure.

But as we all know, all good things must end, and so did this. Eventually Tim and David went out and cranked the backup generator so that Tim and Derek could make breakfast. Gone was the silence, but now the background droning was joined by the crackling of bacon in the frying pan and low voices in the kitchen.

Other sounds very common in the morning are chirps and chimes of booting computers. (Kim needs her e-mail fix every morning as well as a hot breakfast beverage.) We poured our coffee and tea to savor as we awaited the pancakes and bacon. As breakfast preparation continued, the Hab was filled with clicking of fingers on keyboards and questions about when we could eat.

Another sound I should mention is the sound of the pressure pump, which runs every time anyone anywhere turns on the water. Jody suggests that it sounds like the bass sound of a dentist's drill; David calls it a mechanical raspberry. Whatever we call it, it is a constant in our lives. We are all going to miss it when we are gone. Turn on the water, and you hear

drdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrppppp . . .
drdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrppppp . . .
drdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrppppp . . .
drdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrppppp . . .

as the basin fills. This we hear when someone's making tea, or washing dishes, or taking a shower, or cleaning the Hab.

We generally work (with intermittent meals and snacks, of course) fom 7:00 a.m. till 11:00 p.m. or later most days, but today, David has declared a day of rest and fun. So by 7:30 he had Jody out crawling under the big Mars Rover vehicle fixing the dipstick tube. We all looked at one another as we puzzled over what a day of rest was going to mean.

Breakfast over, it was decided that Jody should take Kim and David into Hanksville with him to refuel the Mars Rover. Derek and I worked on reports while Tim searched out some answers to questions on the computer. When the Rover crew returned, we all had lunch, a very nice taco salad buffet, thanks to Tim. Then Jody and David commenced on various MDRS improvements: Jody made a shelf to be installed above the Hab Com computers whenever we can find or buy drywall anchors to help support it.

While he worked on that, David tried to fix the blue truck's taillights-to no avail. I took turns assisting each of them. Unfortunately, neither Jody nor David had the necessary items needed to cross the job off the group "to do" list. David swept out the back of the truck, but I feel sure it already has accumulated a nice layer of sand in it. The wind has picked up in the desert today, and the sand was getting in our eyes and equipment throughout the day.

Projects continued after lunch, until about three o'clock, when we set out on a field trip. David did indeed follow through on his promise to get us all out of the Hab and into the desert today, our "day of rest." We didn't go in EVA suits; instead, we traveled as ourselves in this beautiful landscape. Derek and Kim rode the ATVs; the rest of us followed in David's Explorer. Jody was the chief navigator and guide as he and David took us to Lith Canyon, a place they had visited yesterday.

When we arrived, David took a route in his Explorer that reminded us of the Ford SUV commercials. The Explorer ended up at an angle on the edge of the road, with rugged terrain in the background-finally a man who uses an SUV for what it was built for!

Once we turned our attention to the scenery, we realized again that this place is beautiful. The area where we were is unlike the terrain around the Hab-we climbed several overlooks and saw the canyon below us. We were there to consider it as a site for the Discovery Channel Canada folks. We saw some nice rocks, and the setting felt remote and alien. We could see ourselves back again on Thursday in EVA suits. David, or should I say, Cecil B. Fuller, bustled around checking potential camera angles for the film crew.

After studying the fossils and rocks in the area, Tim, Jody, Kim, and I climbed a ridge across the way. Looking on beyond where we stood, we could see Muddy Creek snaking out away from us across the desert. When we were ready to cross back to David and Derek, I put on my best Southern drawl and radioed the guys, "David, this is Moon Pie 2; we're havin' fun over here, but we're gonna start back across your way now. Over."

We scrambled down the talus slope and grabbed hold of the crumbly sandstone. As Tim and I waited for the Jody and Kim to go on down, he said, "I like to hear the crunching of the rock when we're climbing-have you heard it?" He was right-the rock literally crunched, like someone chewing ice. When our turn came, we cracked and crunched our way across the crumbles and joined the others.

We four met back up with Derek and David, then Kim and Derek mounted their mechanical steeds and roared down the trail and out of sight. The rest of us photographed and directed David's retreat out of the 4-wheel-only parking area and back on to more passable road.

We wended our way back to the Hab as the afternoon waned. After the stressful week of work, repair, and research, we were glad to have had a few hours off-duty.

When we arrived back at the station, we checked the GreenHab temperature and humidity readings, then tromped back into the station and up the stairs to settle down to our work again. In a while, Derek and Tim began supper preparations: tonight it was cheese, mushroom, and onion quesadillas. During supper, we talked about several topics (for once, none of them gross) that helped focus our attention on our last week at MDRS.

I began by asking the group what effect, if any, having a married couple on the crew (Jody and me) had had on the group. The interpersonal relationships on any crew isolated for long periods have to be a concern for a space agency and those who have invested time and energy into pulling off a mission. The group made a few jokes at first but reassured us that having a couple on the crew had not been an issue or divisive.

Crew 15 deliberately mixed up the workloads and assignments so that the two of us are not together all day, and both of us are pretty self-sufficient. Jody commented that the "married" part may not be all that significant-maybe what's more important is whether any two people who know each other very well could reach out and get involved with other members of a newly-formed team. The crew suggested that the personalities are more important than the marital status of the members. We'll see-I'll ask them again at the end of the week!

The next, and more important topic, was to set priorities for the upcoming week. We have been absorbed in the day-to-day workings of the Hab to the point that I was afraid the rest of our time would slip by without our being sure to do the things that were most important to us. We talked about the fact that there's a difference between being in sim mode and being in EVA suits. EVA suits make us look like astronauts when we go outside, but we all agreed, and David confirmed, that NASA astronauts do not spend all their days in space suits. Probably less than five percent of their time on an average mission is spent in suits, we guessed. The rest of the time, they are working on systems, doing experiments, writing reports, documenting activities, and the like. These things we are doing, too.

So the fact that we have to go outside in street clothes to do maintenance and upkeep on the generator, for example, is not breaking sim. We aren't allowed to do these things in the suits. Our situation here at MDRS is not exactly like that of a group of astronauts on Mars-they would have had years of training and a huge amount of money and personnel behind them; we have had an hour or so of training and limited funds to draw on.

But that said, we all agree that the opportunity to serve on a crew here at MDRS is one we would not have missed. We do feel as if we have become a team, a group working together to achieve each person's goals. We are setting goals, solving problems, teaching and learning every day, and enjoying ourselves. Our diverse "skill sets" complement one another well.

Derek argued that Crew 15 is nearly always in sim, as we are six people living in cramped quarters, limited in our contact with the outer world; we cannot re-supply without effort; we do not generally go outside in street clothes (except for today's outing) unless we are conducting repairs or doing maintenance, jobs we are not allowed to do in EVA suits. He made a good case, though in our discussion we all discovered that perhaps Jody and I are suffering less withdrawal-from-civilization pains than the other folks are, as we don't have a TV at home, are used to a dial-up modem, and live without power and running water at our small weekend cabin. The intermittent power, lack of contact with the outside, and the cramped quarters are simply not an issue for us.

The subject turned to our individual projects. Derek, who already has motion studies underway, will hook Tim up to motion sensors tomorrow and choose another subject later in the week. We have all been wearing pedometers for two days now, stopping to give Derek readings every half hour.

He tells us that we are not to get competitive about who has taken the most steps in a day, but we have lighthearted contest anyway. Tim is hands-down the slug of the group, logging about half the steps of the most active striders. We suspected yesterday that his pedometer wasn't reading right, but his readings were similar today with a different pedometer. So he's appropriately the one Derek is choosing to study tomorrow.

Jody, our geologist, wants to see more of the landscape, of course, on foot or by ATV. He will make EVAs off and on all week to collect rock samples to study, accompanied by one or the other of us. Kim has her own studies to conduct, but she is waiting for information from Hawaii before she can test her wireless network protocol. In the meantime, she, Derek, and Tim are going to continue to work on the telescope and make it operational.

David is well-suited in his role as commander, or facilitator might be a better word for what his position is. He is here, he says, to see that we all accomplish our goals and use the time in the way we see fit. To that end, he has taken on all of the important crew correspondence with support people and done his best to see that the Hab is in good working order for us and the crews who follow us.

I plan to continue doing what I have been doing-and writing about it.