Sol Summary – July 21st

Written by Jon Clarke

Sol 2 (or 82)
The weather has not been great to day. It remains cloudy and we had a little rain over night, although not enough to make a difference. The wind has picked up, and is nicely blowing the Mars flag out when we look out the window. While not particular cold, the wind chill is noticeable.

Anushree and Yusuke collected water for us today. We are currently using about 14L per person for day. Anastasiya and I did a pedestrian EVA today with Alex riding shotgun. We walked a total of 4.21 km, exploring the hab ridge to the south west for three purposes: 1) potential sites to sample limestone bedrock for my facies study, 3) patterned ground of interest to Paul, biological features of interest to Anushree, and sites for operation research for our PI Shannon Rupert. We also sampled different lichen form species we observed Paul Sokoloff at the Canadian Museum of Nature. We were able to garner useful data in all fields.

Paul Knightly cooked dinner tonight, spaghetti and freeze dried beef and kebab casserole. Very filling after four hours of EVA! Several people are showering tonight. And remerging as new people. Tonight will also be our twice weekly viewing of Season 2 of the SF TV series The Expanse.

Tomorrow we have a further EVA planned to revisit yesterday’s sites. This will be dependent on the weather of course, which is predicted to worsen slightly. We will see!