MDRS started to feel less like Earth and more like Mars today. The Hab is humming along now and the team is becoming familiar with its peculiar personality. People know their jobs and how to do them.

This morning we woke up and had our staff meeting at 8:00 am, primary topic, the crew's first EVA. I scheduled the suit up time to be 9:00 am sharp realizing that such a feat would probably prove impossible. The EVA's purpose was to deploy the biology experiments that the biology team had brought with them from Austria and Germany. And the details of exactly how that was going to be done in a simulation space suit had not yet been completely thought out at the time. Fortunately, since we were only in a partial simulation today, there was material available to the team to make the deployment tasks feasible.

Suit up actually began around 10:00 am and much to my surprise was completed by 11:00 am! A 1 hour suit up for a first time crew is pretty good based on my experience. The entire crew participated and I think that was the key to success, along with strict adherence to the checklist provided by the suit designers (kudos to you ladies and gentlemen). Grins broke out on the EVA team's faces as they prepared to step through the airlock in simulation mode for the first time.

The EVA was a relatively short one, 2 hours 21 minutes total covering about 2 km, but very productive. All the biology experiments were deployed and the team had some time to scout out sites for Mark Moran's experiments to come over the next two weeks. When the EVA team returned, they were tired but in good spirits.

I was excited at the opportunity to measure how much dust and dirt they brought into the Hab with them as part of my experiment. I only measured a gram and surprisingly only a few dust particles larger than 50-100 microns were collected by the dust sampler a foot above the airlock floor. But we'llsee what happens when the teams start to interact with the surface more in the coming days.

Tonight at 8:00 we had our second meeting of the day and decided that tomorrow everything is ready for us to take the plunge and go for the highest fidelity Mars simulation the MDRS facility provides. No more quick steps outside to check on something. No more strolls in the fresh air. When we take in the sights now, it will only be through the faceplate of our Martian suits. To make the information generated by our time here as beneficial as possible, our simulation constraints come from the surface operation guidelines specified by several recent NASA publications including:

The Mars Project: Avoiding Decompression Sickness on a Distant Planet by Conkin
The Mars Surface Reference Mission: A Description of Human and Robotic Surface Activities edited by Stephen Hoffman.

Our final step into simulation mode should produce interesting results for the human factors study now in full swing here as well as give the crew a little taste of what it is going to be like on Mars for its earliest of explorers. We have already experienced two days of living in isolation together on Earth. Tomorrow we start living in isolation together on Mars.