Commander's Report

April 10, 2008

Boris Yim



Last night, we watched "Apollo 13". It was great to recap the history, but mission support, we had a problem on Mars: BSoD*. In the processing of rebooting the system, we chose instead to go to sleep. We’ll continue the movie tonight.

Today I woke up earlier than normal because it was cold. The cold weather conducted through the outer wall into the room. Wendy had to be refilled to circumvent the leak but each refill lasts a long time, which is not too troublesome.

We planned 2 EVAs today - one in the morning, another in the afternoon. Some of us have been to the Box Canyon before and attracted the rest to visit there too, so that was the destination of the morning EVA. As expected, it was hard to navigate with our limited equipments. They could not find the destination and returned.

Meanwhile, those in the Hab converted the waypoints and grids from UTM to longitude/latitude so that we can make use of our GPS data. Our lunch was mainly homemade bread just made this morning. It was nice and cheap.

The afternoon EVA aimed at going to Candor Chasma as a potential site for halophile sample collection. The Our GPS was unreadable under bright sunlight through the plastic wrap, plastic bag, helmet and sunglasses. We went very far to the east on unmapped existing tracks and found a pile of distinctive rocks and a river on Mars.

The rest of the crew drove to Hanksville for more food and supply for Yuri's Night celebration this Saturday. We hope that the food cabinet will not be emptied out by our crew before then. We had very delicious pasta for dinner after the exciting day.

Clear sky. Star gazing at observatory to follow, plus inventory report and the unfinished movie.
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* BSoD: A Blue Screen of Death is an error screen displayed by certain operating systems, most notably Microsoft Windows, after encountering a critical system error which can cause the system to shut down to prevent damage.