Entropy Day

Nothing lasts forever, and in the noontime sun and freezing nights, the dust and wind and harsh terrain of the "Martian" desert, a lot of things won't last even one season. This, too, is a lesson we'll take home with us: time is short, and entropy never sleeps. The story of this place is, as much as anything, a story of band-aids and half-measures, of fighting back the tide with a leaf blower.

We were driven inside from a late EVA yesterday afternoon by a genuine Martian dust storm, complete with scouring grit and dry lightning, and the resulting charge in the atmosphere was sufficient to clobber our radio reception and slow our satellite uplink to a crawl. This turned out to be the leading edge of a major storm system that blanketed the sky in gloomy clouds and finally managed, around lunchtime today, to dump torrents of Earthly rain on the desert. From the hab windows we could see the water carving new channels in the soil, deepening the trenches and washes that define this canyon country. The desert never sleeps, either.

Anyway, this morning's window of moderate weather was sufficient to get Peter and Julie and Jim out to Phobos Peak again to retrieve the wayward plastic sheeting they'd found there, and afterward to take a rover ride north along the gulley known as Lowell Highway. I'm sure it was beautiful, as everything on Mars seems to be, but along the way Rover 1, sprang a rather ghastly oil leak and started refusing to shift gears. Our gallant astronauts managed to limp it back to the hab and open up the engine for inspection, but the prognosis is not good. Looks like there'll be no more three-rover expeditions for this crew.

Meanwhile, I was inside mucking with the Remote Radio, which I FINALLY got working on the test bench. As many before me have noted, it's an iffy design which was never intended to be anything but temporary. I'm frankly astonished it lasted as long as it did, and even in its "repaired" state it's sharing a common ground between signal and power, which puts a voltage across the ear bud and causes it to heat up uncomfortably. The TALK button also sticks sometimes, and the only way to release it is to briefly cycle power. But given the ratty four-wire cable for which we have no replacement, this is as good as it gets. If the weather relents, we'll take the radio up to the Rockpile again tomorrow and see how it likes the outdoors. Fingers crossed.

And since the stormy afternoon offered no EVA opportunities, Commander Alex decreed that we would all fill out our Psych evaluaions -- part of a Human Factors study being performed by an Australian university. That didn't fill up the whole day, so I rather shockingly managed to fall asleep for 15 minutes in the midst of my colleagues' cabin-fevered antics. And then, with my alternatives exhausted, I was forced to look to my actual job, not as Mission Journalist but as, you know, a journalist. I cranked out my monthly column for the SciFi channel. Frankly, it feels weird to be answering to an Earthly power other than Mission Support. I haven't been following the news at all. What possible relevance could it have out here?

I've clearly crossed a threshold of sorts; the Martian desert doesn't feel like home yet -- I've seen it mainly at a distance, on radio repair missions -- but the hab itself is as cozy as an old bathrobe, and I think we all feel a definite sense of ownership, rather than mere occupancy. There are problems here, yes, but they're our problems, to fix or to live with. Earth may begin at Hanksville, barely six miles away, but even so it's a whole other world.