Today was one of those days that always happens on a crew, but still surprises you and makes it a really bad day. We had grand plans to take our digital repeater up to the Skyline Rim repeater position. After missing a couple of turns (my sense of direction is notoriously bad) and scouting out extra parts of the roads, we finally matched up our position as measured by the GPS with the map. There was supposed to be a road. There were cows. Some shrubbery and cacti. There was even a little wash. But no road. We drove back and forth a couple of times, getting the same vaguely irritated look from one cow who kept watching us. Still no road.

After talking a bit with mission support, I think this was a combination of a lack of clarity on the map, failure on my part to verify our exact route, and the fact that the person I verified the general route with probably thought we were planning to walk the last leg. It's very frustrating, as we were hoping for some really good radio coverage with that repeater. Tomorrow, we'll deploy up on radio ridge - a good position, but not nearly as high as Skyline Rim. However, we'll at least be able to test the system - hopefully it should be able to support itself from a power standpoint with the solar panel.

We're going to go into sim tonight (which is really easy, because it is unbelievably windy outside and is supposed to start raining), and we'll see how strict it's going to be able to be. I don't think we'll be able to get the antennae up in sim. That's something that'll be a problem on Mars - towers for navigation will need to be set up since there won't be enough of a satellite presence and there, you won't have the option of just doing it out of sim. As far as this rotation goes, we're testing the technology. Maybe next year, the GT crew can test tower deployment in sim...

But there's lasagna cooking in the oven, so the day's definitely headed up.

Emily Colvin
Commander, MDRS Crew 60