The first time I had heard about the Mars Society and its activities in the simulation of living and working on Mars in 'Mars' habitats in remote areas on Earth that share some similarities with the Martian environmental conditions, was, when a colleague from the UK visited our institute at DLR in Köln, Germany. He talked enthusiastically about his stay on FMARS, the Mars habitat of the Mars Society in Canada in the high Arctic. For me it was very exiting to hear about being part of an international crew and working under the constraints of a closed mission simulation.

During the World Space Congress last year in Houston I had the opportunity to see and to talk to Robert Zubrin, the president of the Mars Society. I expressed my interest in a participation and he said without discussions: send me an email and I'll send you dates of rotations where the crew is not yet completed. To my surprise he nearly immediately answered to my email with the short note, that I could come to the MDRS in April/Mai of this year. Soon afterwards the commander of crew 18, Brent, contacted me and told me details about our stay there. Now I am really here and I can not believe that today is already the 12th day at the MDRS. The time runs very fast. In the first days we had to learn how to operate the hab and we had to develop a routine for living and working. We usually have a meeting in the morning and in the evening to plan the next activities and to discuss, what we had experienced in between. The crew consists of people who never met before and up to now we are a quite good team with complementary knowledge and skills.

For the planning of the EVAs and the search for interesting places where we could make drilling experiments with which Mark wants to look for the production of methan in the soil by methanogenic bacteria or places where we could collect salt-containing soil samples for Simone and Elia it is very helpful to have a geologist, Dave, in the team. He himself is interested in the geology of this area and especially in the distribution and amount of dust. The biologists Simone and Elia are looking for halophilic, that is salt-loving, microorganisms and they had brought with them pure cultures of characterized strains which they are exposing here to the environmental conditions of the desert. I myself am measuring the biological efficency of the ambient solar UV irradiance with a biological UV dosimeter called 'DLR-Biofilm' and the individual personal UV doses during the EVAs.

Brent quantitates and characterizes every day the dust that is brought into the hab by the EVA crews. The maximum value up to now was more than 10 g!!!. In addition, he asks us every morning to fill in a questionaire describing how we feel at that moment and in the evening to do computer tests measuring concentration and reaction times. Joan is our computer specialist who always helps me when I have problems. All in all it is a quite broad spectrum of research activities and we are learning a lot from each other. Now we have only three more days in full simulation, but we have ideas and plans for many more things we would like to do here. For me it is a great experience!