Day 8 Pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/bjg222/MDRS2010Day8
I was up bright and early this morning, refreshed after finally getting a solid night's sleep. Breakfast consisted of cinnamin buscuits made by Jessica (today was a cooking day), and the entertainment was provided by Jillian using a lighter to try and melt a security ink tag off her backpack. She swears they just forgot to remove it when she bought it at the store! Shortly after breakfast, Dan, Eric, and Jessica suited up to hike up the engineering hill to the wind turbine again. This time, they were taking it down so they could disconnect the electronics and bring them back inside, and Dan would be able to see what he can do to fix it. They weren't out too long. After they got back, Jillian, Chris, and I suited up for another mapping EVA riding around on the ATV rovers. We decided to give this EVA a dual purpose and also test the range of our ham radios. Since we still don't have the antennas we need for the base station, we were testing just the range of using the handhelds. Unfortunately, Chris's radio didn't want to cooperate, and we were left without enough radios, so he volunteered to stay behind. Hopefully we'll get it fixed (and by we I mean Jillian, our resident radio master) and he can go next time. Jillian and I had a fun EVA, although my suit backpack didn't fit right, and it was downright painful to go over bumps some time. But we discovered life on Mars! A small chipmunk ran right along side me at one point! We got back to the hab about two hours after we left, and basically discovered that the radios don't reach the hab if you can't see it! That meant that most of the time we were gone, we had not radio link back to the hab! While we were gone, Jessica attempted to make a sort of ground beef using the infamous imitation beef bits. She was fairly successful, as well as can be done. They had apparently had "hamburgers" using it, but I made mac n cheese for lunch and added some in. We worked on various tasks through the afternoon. I was feeling somewhat tired, so in an effort to avoid getting any sort of sinus cold, I took a short nap, and soon it was dinner time. We had decided a few days ago that we wanted to do breakfast for dinner on the next cooking day, so Jillian made pancakes. They were really good, and weren't nearly as thick as the last time! After dinner, it was perfectly clear outside, so we all went out into the "pressurized tunnels" that lead up to the observatory hill for some stargazing. We could see Mars and Saturn, and of course the well known constellations like Orion and the Big Dipper. However, to my disappointment, the moon was nearly full, so you really couldn't see too many stars (at least compared to last year out here when we had a nearly new moon!). I still got some good pictures, and a few nice shots of the moon, but it was too bright to try to do star trails. After everybody got bored and went inside, and I got tired of standing outside by myself, we watched another episode of Firefly (It's a pretty good sci-fi show that was on TV back in 2002. I had never seen it before, but I like it!), then it was off to bed.
(PS - I was sorely disappointed by the fact that I didn't realize my camera was on ISO 3200 most of the day! So I apologize that some of my pictures are so grainy!)
Day 12
16 years ago