Mission day: 01

Our first day! Obviously, we were all excited to start our mission today. We were up early and got our scientific pretests done before breakfast. The HISEAS van came to take us to the habitat and you could tell by the banter that we were eager to get going. We got to HISEAS and unloaded our equipment and we got to spend our last bit of time before we closed the door to the airlock and started our mission.

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Closing the door was a bit surreal. It is a simple barrier to the outside world but closing it means our mission has begun.
 
It is just a door, but we will only be opening it for the next week with space suits on for extra vehicular activities (EVAs). Our EVAs are scientific in nature – HISEAS teams explore the surrounding volcanic fields and lava tubes as a part of a geological / geographical survey much like astronauts would be doing on the surface of the moon or Mars.
 
Our first duty in the hab was to get settled in for the week and have lunch. Lunch was a bit of an adventure, Gord and Chad took the first go at freeze dried food and came up with something that approximated noodle soup. I would love to say it was Michelin restaurant ready but that would be a bit of a stretch. But, good on them for getting it done and we will all be taking turns cooking so we cannot really point fingers. A bit of casual fun, but not finger pointing!
 
After lunch we recorded our first in hab brain performance session – it is a bit tedious as we are collecting three experiments at the same time as opposed to simply doing the fatigue assessment, but we know it is the science that we are here to do. I wonder how my brain health and performance will change over the course of our week here. I guess that’s the point really. We will be publishing our results as we go, but we have to overcome a few technical difficulties first. Indeed, we never intended to publish our data this way so there is some analysis code to be written.
 
Our afternoon was spent getting familiar with the hab – there are duties that need to be done each day and these all end in reports that we need to write: engineering, science, journalist, and a daily overview.

We are lucky in that we have a crew commander from HISEAS with us – Michaela, to help us with the habitat. For longer duration missions the crew would have spent a lot more time training so we have to replace that by borrowing an experienced crew commander. With that said, we are all fairly sure that she is going to let us learn from our mistakes.
 
What else?
 
We drew straws and tomorrow our first EVA team will be Chad, Kent, and me. It will be cool to go outside but there is a lot of tech to learn about. More on that tomorrow.
 
The rest of the afternoon was spent doing some science and getting our exercise in, if we do not go on EVA we are expected to do one hour a day of physical activity. We have an elliptical, a tread mill, some weights and mat, and that’s about it. We will definitely be getting creative on that front.

Time to sign on and make dinner as I am the designated cook tonight.
 
Goodnight from Mars.
 
O. Krigolson
 
End of Report