A film crew from Los Angeles, who are shooting a story about MDRS for a French television show, visited today. This has made Jennifer and Fathi the objects of much good-natured teasing-- Jennifer because she got to go to town and eat a real breakfast and Fathi because he is the film crew's main interview subject. The crew arrived just before the day's first EVA, one rescheduled from Phase Two. The EVA crew included Fathi, Rocky and Guy, who had volunteered to be part of an experiment by the biology team to see just what it takes to cross train people who are not biologists in biological fieldwork. Jennifer, Steve J. and Nishi were along to document the EVA. Meanwhile, Matt and Steve D. volunteered to take the nonfunctional ATV to Grand Junction for repairs, so they were also gone most of the day. Everyone involved in these outings had a great time, while those of us back at the Hab got to enjoy a much quieter afternoon than normal. I managed to get some lab work do!

There have been so many improvements to the Hab since I was last here, but a crew must still spend an inordinate amount of time on maintenance and planning, or things can get very cluttered very quickly.

We are the first crew to have a pair of rovers, a PEV, a chase vehicle and trailer, plus the three ATVs. While having the rovers is an exciting part of ExOne, we realized very quickly that the potential for accidents increased with these additional research tools. We have spent some time discussing how safety and communications must be altered to better deal with these additions to MDRS and we hope to add these ideas to the MDRS Hab Manual before we leave.

At our meeting last night, Steve D. brought up a very important point about how research is done at MDRS. We tend to focus, I think, on the science we are doing out in the field, and put some of the human factors research on the bottom of our list in terms of daily planning. Steve made the point, and rightfully so, that actually scheduling some of the tests into our daily plan should be done, much as we do with EVAs. To that end, we have scheduled a group personality test this evening that will take two hours. After spending seven months planning for ExOne, I can assure you that while the science and logistics may be challenging, it is the human factors stuff-- the interactions and perceptions of crew members-- that can make or break a mission. We need to support human factors research much more than we have in the past. Of course, this was before I had to actually take one of Steve's CogState tests!