Journalist's Report

February 27, 2008

Private Ham



Today began bright and sunny, and the sun shone in the crew’s hearts as
well as when they sat down to a breakfast of the
slightly-more-tolerable-than-scrambled-eggs option: granola with
blueberries. The crew set out for morning EVAs soon afterwards with
shining eyes, satisfied stomachs, and joyous spirits.

The BioBabe headed up a biological sampling crew (consisting of Googly
and Fam as backup), which travelled down the very scenic Tycho Brahe
Highway on their way to the sampling site. Five samples were taken,
leaving vials for eight more. These last few will probably be filled
with delicious samples before Crew 67’s rotation at MDRS ends, and
those for whom the sampling is being done will shower praise upon their
diligence. Meanwhile, Kim and Whisky headed out for a brief pedestrian
EVA, during which they set up waypoints (marked by piles of stones) on
the route that Guy’s experimental subjects will take when he collects
data on their ability to navigate with limited support from satellite
navigation aids.

Back at the Hab, Chris discovered his superpower: standing by broken
machinery and thinking about disassembling it until it starts working
again. He applied this power (which works much like jokes about The
Don – compare “Travelers worry about meeting villains on lonely
stretches of highway; villains worry about meeting The Don on lonely
stretches of highway” to “The remote advisers don’t know what it takes
to make the autoclave function in the presence of the on-site
biologist; the autoclave doesn’t know what it takes not to function in
the presence of Sir Ostafew the Wrenchmaster”) by making the autoclave
start working again. In the meantime, Phillip held a brief educational
outreach conference with schools in Boston and Eau Gallie, Florida, and
greatly enjoyed the chance to teach a few students a little bit about
planetary science, the Earth, and Mars.

In the afternoon, Heather started using her autoclave to culture some
of the samples she had collected on agar plates, dancing and skipping
about the lab as she did. More EVAs followed, as LOX and Googly headed
off for an Engineers’ Day Out, accompanied by Fam, and Kim took Blondie
out on his navigation course to see if it could be navigated.

The Engineers, scouring the walls of the canyon, suddenly saw something
high up on the wall that looked very intriguing. They stopped and
looked more closely, and the mysterious item – a fossil? A really
interesting rock? Candy? – only seemed more intriguing. Soon Fam
couldn’t stand not being able to touch the item, and she broke sim and
doffed her EVA suit in the middle of a Martian field. She climbed up a
rock wall, and although she managed to avoid real physical injury, part
of the rock wall became rock canyon floor during her ascent, and LOX
had to pop his suit too to help her down. Not wanting to return alone
and in dishonor in the face of his teammates’ loss, Googly popped his
suit too, and the tally mounted to three new marks for the scoreboard
when the crew finally returned to the Hab. The mysterious item turned
out to be a smear of dirt on the canyon wall. Fam reluctantly noted
that “the way this canyon erodes tends to make everything look like
fossil remnants.” The whole ordeal would have likely slipped through
the cracks had Googly not documented the entire thing on camera (it is
rumored that the photos have since mysteriously disappeared).

Kim and Blondie were having a much more conventional adventure, with
Kim taking a track log on the GPS while Blondie wandered through the
desert with nothing more than periodic (and somewhat inaccurate, by
design) bearing and distance updates, looking for the previously-built
stone waypoints. A long period of emulating the ancient Hebrews ended
when Blondie finally recognized a pile of rocks ahead as the waypoint –
although Blondie was somewhat disconcerted to discover his own
footprints already passing over the waypoint. The process of
approaching to within one hundred meters of a marker and then walking
in circles for twenty minutes trying to locate it was repeated once
more during the great search for the second waypoint. After Blondie
finally arrived at the one pile of rocks that he had not yet examined
closely, Kim stopped him, indicated the setting sun, and advised ending
the navigation course early. Blondie and Kim piled extra rocks on top
of the first two waypoint markers on the way back, to make them more
visible for the next poor sap who leaves the Hab under the tender care
of Kim’s experimental protocols.

Back home, Heather and Randy cleaned out the fridge and inventoried the
cabinets. The EVA crews came home to the smell of baking bread and the
promise of another tasty supper and a restful night’s sleep.