EVA-13

Objectives: Phase I: take some panorama pictures around the hab and "glamour shots" of Doug for a poster for this year's European Mars Society Convention. Phase II: hike up Phobos Peak (WPT 107) to re-survey its elevation which was missing from the waypoint database. Using a directional antenna for ham radio direction-finding experiments was another objective of Phase II of this EVA.

EVA Team:
EVA Commander: Jan
EVA Navigator: Jan
EVA Crew: Heidi, Rebecca; Doug (Phase I only)
Hab Comm: Kyle

Planned Route: MDRS - Engineering Ridge - Pothole Field - Phobos Peak - MDRS

Timeline:
Don Suits: 1130
Enter Airlock: 1150
Egress: 1156
EVA 13 Phase I finished: 1231
Doug ingress: 1241
At foot of Phobos Peak: 1320
On Phobos Peak summit: 1407
Ingress: 1510
Enter Hab: 1511

New Waypoints Established (Details See Excel Database):

• WPT 151Engineering Ridge (ridge of Cougar Hill overlooking the hab and the engineering area)
• WPT 152Picnic Area (Rebecca thought this was a nice place for a picnic)
• WPT 153Stonehenge (weird slanted stones)
• WPT 154Ant Ares (anthill on simulated Mars, and a star)
• WPT 155Phobos Phoot (foot of southern flank of Phobos Peak)
• WPT 156Gargoyle Gallery (Artifacts? Wind created? Who knows?)
• WPT 157Phobos Peak (Phobos, moon of Mars - existing waypoint by the same name, WPT 107, was renamed "Phobos Flank" since that is where WPT 107 actually turns out to be)
• WPT 158Kyle's Reflection Rock (internal ham joke)
• WPT 159Fritz Field (in honor of Rebecca's chinchilla)
• WPT 160HabView (we could see the hab from here)
• WPT 161Mellow Mushrooms (erosion has removed soil from underneath flat stones, and it ends up looking like a field of giant mushrooms)
• WPT 162Topo Marker 128SR10E

Narrative: This was one tough EVA. Tough and inspiring at the same time - funny how these two attributes are often combined here on simulated Mars.

During Phase II, we covered over three kilometers, some of it climbing the steep slopes of Phobos Peak, under a beautiful cloudless sky that made us long for an EVA suit cooling system. Phase I, however, was challenging in a different way: we needed to shoot a perfect photograph of Doug, in his EVA suit, sitting on a chair outside the hab, reading Robert Zubrin's seminal "The Case for Mars", and looking as Martian as possible. This was in response to a special request from the Dutch chapter of the Mars Society - they needed an image just like that, to be photoshopped into a poster for the upcoming European Mars Society convention. Doug actually ended up looking very Dutch - I guess the orange folding chair he was sitting in had something to do with that (orange being the Dutch national color). We also took a few pictures of Heidi and Rebecca doing some in-sim sunbathing in their full EVA suits - it is the last day of Spring Break after all :-)

But all too soon the fun and games were over. Doug returned to the hab to help the guys with some IVA balloon and robot prep for tomorrow, and Heidi, Rebecca and myself started heading southeast, towards Phobos Peak. The first kilometer or so took us through a barren wasteland of otherworldly beauty - the most Mars-like scenery I have seen here so far. We marked a few waypoints at memorable locations (fields of oddly-shaped but evenly-angled rocks; an anthill) and finally found ourselves at "Phobos Phoot", with the summit of Phobos Peak towering above us. After a brief communications check and safety briefing, we started the challenging ascent along the southern ridge of the mountain.

About halfway up the way to the summit, I noticed something odd at the edge of my peripheral vision and turned on instinct to check it out. I could not believe my eyes: a neatly spaced row of football-sized rocks was protruding from the steep hill, shaped like medieval grotesques of human and animal faces looking out over the desert plains (see today's pictures). My first thought was that these must have been carved by some local with an odd sense of humor, so striking was their resemblance to cartoons of facial profiles. Then, on closer examination, it seemed like they actually had been shaped by the winds of centuries, given their smooth shapes and the fact that they only looked like faces when viewed from a certain angle, thus greeting only explorers coming up Phobos Peak along the specific path we had chosen.

But aside from what - or whoever created these silent guardians, I suddenly realized that, had this been "real" Mars, these potential artifacts could not possibly have been discovered by any robotic tool. Too steep was the slope, too numerous the boulders dotting it, too treacherous its sands, and too specific the angle from which these shapes became obvious. Maybe many decades from now robotics will have advanced to the point of mimicking human mobility and subconscious processing capability, but by then humans on Mars will hopefully already have lifted the most important secrets of the Red Planet.

Once past this waypoint, which we christened "Gargoyle Gallery", we soon reached the summit and were greeted by a breath-taking panorama. From the Henry Mountains in the south, to Skyline Rim and Factory Butte dominating the west, to Goblin State Park in the north, and Submarine Ridge in close towards the east, hardly a better vantage point could be imagined to enjoy the majesty of the landscape surrounding MDRS. The hab itself, only a distant white speck in a sea of red rock and sand, nevertheless provided a point of reference for the vastness of the shapes and spaces we were gazing at.

Of course we took pictures, but even our high-resolution cameras can only capture a very limited-bandwidth representation of the rich tapestry of nature that we were taking in with our own senses. By then it had already gotten much later than planned, so we reluctantly set our GPS to guide us back towards the hab, where a simple but ample lunch - and plenty of much-needed Gatorade - awaited us.

I can't wait to go out again into this alien environment, and discover more of its mysteries.