Tiriganiaq (CREW 19) Sol 5 Report 19-7-2026

Today we were on strict orders from both command crew and mission control to take it easy. Every day can’t be an intensive EVA day or we risk burnout. We were grateful to our commander for building an extra hour of sleep this morning into our Sunday schedule.

We woke up to dropping temperatures and rising winds.

Preparing for the cold requires ongoing maintenance tasks, like keeping the generators happy and humming. It also means lower tech jobs like leveling the top of swollen interior hab doors so that they stay shut, making less work for the heaters (powered by the generators) to keep the air inside warm enough to sustain five warm-blooded mammals. Since the resident warm-blooded mammals are mostly made of water, Laura and Anderson conducted an EVA with the practical but crucial aim of refilling our water supplies from the nearby river. No mysterious landforms on this excursion, but our intrepid space walkers got the job done, logging another successful EVA for this mission.

The rising winds chill the air, but they also bring a bright silver lining for our science program. Tasha, who trained as part of Crew 19, has been serving on the mission support team keeping things running smoothly from afar. Tasha is a specialist on Mars dust, and we brought her experiment on dust deposition to deploy here on her behalf. Today CSO Anderson set up the apparatus outside the hab and will continue to monitor it, allowing Tasha to measure how wind and dust interact—how much dust the wind brings, and how much it takes away. Tasha’s ongoing dust research uses sensors on the Perseverance rover, currently operating west of Jezero Crater on Mars. Haughton Crater and Jezero Crater may be hundreds of millions of kilometers away, but their similarities and differences will hopefully provide useful comparative data on how two extreme landscapes change over time.