Journalist's Report
March 31, 2008
Guerric de Crombrugghe


Another day at the MDRS, another day on Earth. But being on Earth
doesn't mean we can't reach for the sky : we have been doing a lot of
astronomy today! The radiotelescope was broken, and unused for a very
long time (since Crew 10?). Maybe it thought it could remain quiet even for
a longer time, but then it was not counting on the intervention of Crew 70!
The Hab is now filled with the pleasant galactic background noise of 20.1 MHz.
Elnaz and I officially have become the Radiotelescope operators!
Working on the radiotelescope is very interesting for us since none of us has
a solid background in radioastronomy (Elnaz and I only know about
visual astronomy). Furthermore, I think that if the first Marsonauts
do some astronomy, it would probably be radioastronomy rather than
visual astronomy. Indeed, an antenna is easier to build and to
transport than a telescope, especially if the antenna is just a dipole
instead of a dish.

Violette and Boris went to Price to arrange some strange things about
the car rental (again!). Hope the Marsonauts won't have so many
problems when they go to Mars. It also seems that we have some problems
with the water heater and the water tank, but I was too busy with the
radiotelescope to really know what's going on. Then we had some more training with the ATV without EVA suits.
We are now finally ready to begin our simulation!

One more night before the red planet.

PDF version with English and translation to Farsi