It is our meanest enemy. It crawles into any joint mechanism and cripples it, it floats down invisibly into human airways, causing infections, it can charge itself electrically and thus sabotage our communication equipment. It is a major design driver in creating a safe mission scenario. It is so small it is hard to detect unless it has been accumulated in dangerous amounts. Dust. You mention it, we fear it. Seriously: dust on Earth is a plague, but no hazard - on Mars, it is both: the martian soil is highly oxidative and in some places even cancerogene due to hexavalent chrome contents. With that in mind, dust mitigation is a major issue here in our mission: therefore we were the first one to bring along a simulated glove box to handle our soil samples. The EVA-crews were required to brush off their suits and boots before entering the Habitat, in worst cases, after very dirty EVA's even clean the entire suit with a strong vacuum cleaner which can filter the dust. One of the problems all Apollo surface crewmembers mentioned was the dust. I think it was Al Shepard who said that pretty much any technical challenge of a planetary surface mission can be overcome, except for dust.

Speaking of soil, some stress was caused by a core sample we had taken on EVA-21 which had a yellowish coloring in the sunlight. Mentioning this to Mission Support (which is a kind of secondary Mission Control Center to Salzburg and a contingency infrastructure in case we loose contact with our primary team) caused a lot of stir, as there was concern that this sample might be comprised of uranium, which is indeed found in Utah; fortunately, this development came to an end as pictures and detailed descriptions were sent to both Mission Control Salzburg, Mission Support Denver and our Geology Operations Console. Well, although this was a rather exotic incidence at this station (didn't I say previously, that on this station, anything is possible?), but it stirred an interesting debate during lunch time of how a crew on the Red Planet would react to such a developement.

Speculation, speculations, spectulations of what might one day be... and we are laying the brickstones making the road to that planet in a not too-distant future... Signing of from Mars for the last evening - I can already hear the turbopumps filling the tanks for the main combustion chamber of our Earth return vehicle... as of now we are experiencing our last sunset on Mars.

Your's Gernot Gröemer, HSO