Commander's Report

April 4, 2008

Boris Yim



Commander's Report
April 4, 2008

Boris Yim

It is an exciting day. Last night, we watched another movie called "The
Red Planet" which has lots of relation to what we are doing. The bread
we made for breakfast was like a chunk of cake, but it is better than
the rock we had. Everyday we found lots of new things in the Hab.
Basically, the Hab is like an unorganized museum, and a garage sale for
all the stuff will take weeks. The attic and the first floor is truly
amazing if you dare to look into every corner. There are hundreds of
batteries and utensils, tens of torches (flashlights), routers, tapes, hoses, pipes,
etc., not to mention the Antarctic pile. There are all sorts of things
such as animal bones, TVs, chess games, a NASA film canister, etc. We
spent effort to group the stuff properly in an attempt to reduce their
entropy. We also tidied the area and mopped the floor, but the endless
items delivered by 70 crews indeed qualifies for a Martian museum.

We planned 2 EVAs in the afternoon. The objective of the 1st one is to
repair the weather station and remove the wooden skirt covering the
water pipes. A hike was added to the EVA to attempt to rescue a hat
lost in a previous EVA. When we were returning to the Hab, an alien
white vehicle was spotted entering the engineering area. The
unidentified object was promptly reported to the Hab. The vehicle
backed out and followed 2 EVA members back to the Hab. The alien in the
vehicle was found to be Zuma Press from Earth who wanted to photograph
us. We greeted him in our spacesuits and showed him around. He photographed
our 2nd EVA which was an ATV trip for sample collection, and went back
to Earth. Later, one of us needed to make an urgent call, so some of us
teleported to Earth, too, and came back with some supplies. We will be
under media coverage for the next 2 days, and be the host of our friend
from Earth.