Crew Status: Day 7 of our rotation, and third full day in sim. Again, a busy day, with lots accomplished. The Crew remains hyped and excited.

Daily Recap: This morning, first thing, I connected the Weather Station cable to the Windows 98SE machine I hauled along for data acquisition use, and it fired right up. I had tried connecting it last night to my newish Sony Viao, which has no standard serial port. My USB to Serial adapter did not recognize the weather station. I set the data interval for one sample every 10 minutes, which will allow almost a year's worth of data collection. I plan to download the first day's data tomorrow morning, then run it for the remainder of our rotation, and download again as part of the Crew 29 training next Saturday.

I was in the GreenHab to video tape the first feeding of the Salad Machine, and noted that one of the lettuce units failed to flood. I removed the pump, gave it a few whacks, and it restarted. Subsequent cycles worked fine. I also noted another Hobo unit in the South end of the GreenHab, with one temperature sensor dangling into Tank Five. I downloaded the data from it, as well as the Hobo unit located near the center of the same section. The first one was a two temperature logger, the latter a Relative Humidity and temperature. Both units only contained less than a week's worth of data, as the data interval was set too short, and the memory buffer filled up. I re-deployed this unit to the Musk Observatory, mounting it on the wooden shelf, with a data interval of 10 minutes, for continuous 154 days of data collection. A comprehensive Data logging Report will be forthcoming in the next day or so.

We had a total of three EVAs today. EVA-5 took off around 1030, and visited Eden, via Hell's Pass. EVA-6 left around 1600 to Tank Wash. EVA-7 was another short hike up the hill to the repeater station as part two of our Dewey Cooling Vest test. On the way back, we retrieved the Onset rain gauge, that Jim Russell of Crew 27 located along with the Temp/RH Hobo reported on earlier in the week. Again, I was able to download the data, which in this case covered several months in 2003. The unit itself has sand inside, and I plan to clean it out over the next several days, and redeploy it to the mast of the new weather station. It will not interface with it, and data from it will need to be offloaded separately.

We also had two visitors from Oregon show up late yesterday, astronomers Bob McGown and Sean League, who brought in some equipment to attempt to get the motor drive to work. They were unsuccessful. But we had a good mini-star party last night and went briefly out of sim to observe Venus, Jupiter and other objects through Bob's 10" Dobson scope.

I also shot two short time lapse sequences, which will be posted once the image server is restored. The first documents a typical filling of the Hab's potable water tank, shot at one frame every 10 seconds. The second was clouds and hills in the afternoon with one frame every 5 seconds. We are currently experiencing a major Martian Dust storm, so our weather data tomorrow should be especially interesting. Several gusts have literally shaken the Hab.

Tomorrow's Plan: More EVAs, focusing on Mars analog sites we have identified over the last several days. Gregorio has downloaded a number of MER images that we plan to use a comparison shots.

Daily Reports: The following reports should be in by 21:30.

1. Commander's Check In (this report) -- Gus Frederick
2. XO/Journalist Report -- Steve Featherstone
3. GreenHab Report -- Kathleen Johnson
4. Engineering Report -- G. Drayer & A. Rzeszutko
5. EVA Report - Crew 28