Crew 18 made it! We ended our simulation at noon today and began packing and tidying up the Habitat. Mark and I have to catch our flights back home tomorrow while the rest of the team flies out at various times on Monday. We want to thank all of the great Mars Society volunteers and benefactors who have donated their time, money, equipment and talents to assist our endeavor. Our work would have been impossible without you. We are in your debt.

After we broke sim, Charles Frankel, this field season's first commander and a crewmate of mine from FMARS, came into the Hab with his television crew. It is great to see an old friend. With an educational background in geology and the communication skills of a journalist, it is always enjoyable to talk to him. I highly recommend reading his book, "Volcanoes of the Solar System." The crew has been having a good time showing his crew around, answering their questions and playing for the camera.

It has been a very busy last day here. Very quickly the population of MDRS has more than doubled. With all of our responsibilities and handover activities, I hope I did not forget to pack something for my trip back home.

It will be strange to wake-up on Monday morning at my house in Maryland. When I walk out of my bedroom there, I will be in a hallway across from the spare bedroom instead of the kitchen/wardroom/living room that we have here. But however bizarre it might sound, there are things I am going to miss about living on analogue Mars. I will miss the friends I have made and the daily excitement of planning EVA's to new and interesting locations across the expanse of the beautiful Utah desert.

Where does our work go from here? This rotation had several research objectives that were months in the planning. It is our intent that over the next year you will see the results of our efforts in the appropriate scientific and engineering journals. Publishing our work for the scientific community at large is critical. Without it, our time spent here will have very little impact on any future manned exploration of Mars. I have stressed this point to the crew several times and I think they understand.

This has been a great learning experience for the entire crew. I believe they agree with me that the quality of the research in these simulations is largely determined by the quality of the crew and the experiments they bring with them. I hope some of them want to return here and continue their work, or perhaps extend it to FMARS or the Euro-MARS.

The Euro-MARS, in particular, would be an excellent location at which to continue the research programs we started here. Since it will be the third Mars analogue station and incorporate the lessons learned from the previous two, it promises to be the best facility yet for conducting these simulations.

By this time tomorrow the crew will no longer be together. Everyone will be going their separate ways. I will be on an airplane heading home. I will try to start directing my thoughts to my other tasks at NASA that I put on hold for the last two weeks. I am sure the James Webb Space Telescope project will be knocking down my door when I get back to the office. But concentrating on that work right away will be hard to do. The lure of Mars is strong. I will have to hold myself back from immediately reducing the data I took here, drawing conclusions and planning the next step. Space business is fun! There is not any other work in the world that I would rather be doing. And there is not any other place in the world that I would have rather spent these last two weeks.

This is Crew 18, signing off.