E-Logbook

MIT Haughton Mars Expedition 2005

 

 

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July 16, 2005

Written by: Matt Silver

 

With Oli and Erica gone, the weather has decided to get even worse! We awoke today to light rain and thick fog. In the middle of the day the winds picked up substantially and many people had to go make sure their tents were adequately secured. Jack’s (the cook’s) tent was in fact almost flattened by the winds, and Oz and Fez went out to add some guy-lines. Around dinner time the rain turned to sleet and then snow, which moved horizontally across the arctic desert and piled along the tents. Everyone in camp was generally happy, however, because snow is not as wet as fog and rain! Samson Simeone, who is from Resolute and helping out with camp, says that this weather will probably last another couple of days. Unfortunately, his sleep bag has been soaked because the tarp under his tent was not quite right, so he placed the bag near the heater and must wait for it to dry.

 

Figure 1: Samson and his wet sleeping bag in the Mess Tent at 10:30pm.

 

The weather notwithstanding, Mike and Matt made a lot of progress. Mike worked through the GUI for the RFID experiments and the relational database, both of which should be nearing completion. Matt spent much of the day entering the Greenhouse inventory into the excel spreadsheet. This took more time than expected, because the Greenhouse team was rather thorough in the inventory they handed over to us. In all, over 350 items were copied and categorized in the excel spreadsheet, and then their various attributes—such as “perishability type”, “hazard type,” etc—were identified.

 

The internet still is not up, so this will not be posted for a couple of days. Steve and the comms group were able to put up an intranet today, and Christine created a trench to run a hub over to the mess tent so that we could start our RFID tagging experiment. Before dinner we set up most of the equipment to begin reading tags when people walk through the door, and we plan to have this up and running tomorrow morning.  Until then, it’s going to be a long, cold night on Arctic Devon island. We are looking forward to getting the thermal undersides to our sleeping bags when the others arrive!

 

After dinner, John Schutt gave a very interesting presentation on a trip about a climb he made in the Himalayas. I forget the name of the peak now, but at 27,000 ft, it is the 5th or 6th highest mountain in the world.

 

Figure 2: The view towards the "waste-management" tents after dinner. Not bad for July 16!