EVA Number: 02
Objectives: First EVA for fourth crewmember; gather radiation data; test long-range communications and position tracking system.

EVA Commander: Jan Osburg
EVA Crew: Anne Campeau
Hab Comm: Jason Sherwin

Planned Route: MDRS - Family Crest - MDRS

Timeline:
Don Suits: 1507h MST
Enter Airlock: 1555h MST
Egress: 1600h MST
1633h at Mount Nutella
1720h at Family Crest
Ingress: 1756h MST
Enter Hab: 1758h MST

New Waypoints Established: none

Narrative (Anne): I'm free, I'm free. Today was the second EVA for the crew, but the first glimpse of the outside Martian world for the engineer who has been locked in the basement cleaning since we went into sim. I went with Jan to test the range of the position reporting and voice communications system.

First, we put a voice repeater on the LiftPort balloon at about 150 feet. After that, we headed out to see how far we could go. It was great to finally see the landscape and travel to the hills that are seen in the distance through the portholes of the HAB. Jan and I ended up traveling 7 km, as the crow flies, over the beautiful desert till we lost communication with the HAB.

We managed to reach the canyon, admire the view, and then head back for dinner. We bumbled back to the HAB with the sun in on helmets, and wind - well, not in our face to complete another expedition at MDRS.

Narrative (Jan): It is great to be back in an EVA suit, roaming the Mars-like desert around the hab. In addition, we have made another step towards establishing our full radiocommunications system by successfully testing voice and data comms over almost the entire length of Lowell Highway North. We also found that the balloon-mounted repeater increased the already impressive f range of two-meter simplex by another couple of klicks. Our first APRS transmissions were received and mapped at the hab in near-real-time, and also transmitted to an APRS server on the web (http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/breadcrumb.cgi?call=KI4AGQ-7 for track information - we will work on improving map resolution - and http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/raw.cgi?call=KI4AGQ-7 for raw data). The UI-View log will be sent to Mission Support Atlanta as a separate file.