Dispatch from Mars Society Arctic Expedition Robert Zubrin 14 Jul 2001
Friday night we finally were able to get everyone to stop working at the same time and have some group R&R watching a DVD projector image of the movie “The Vertical Limit.” If you’ve seen this movie, you know that the scenery and cinematography are incredible, but the action is ridiculously contrived, with the climbers making one absurd mistake after another in order to maintain the momentum of the film as an avalanche of literal cliffhangers. It had us all in stitches. The fun was interrupted, however, by news of a serious medical problem at camp, which we picked up over our UHF link.
One of the visiting journalists started suffering from dizziness and shortness of breath. Rainer Effenhausen, who was a member of the first crew, is a NASA flight surgeon, but he is back at Johnson Space Center now. We could hear over the radio as he directed Pascal Lee by satellite phone to take the man’s blood pressure and conduct other parts of a medical examination.
This was telemedicine, done not in simulation but for real; it may also be the way medicine will need to be conducted on an mission to Mars. The decision reached was to pull the man out. He was evacuated by Twin Otter to Resolute on Saturday afternoon.
The plan for today was a four-person motorized EVA to Trinity Lake and Breccia Hill. Trinity is located in the crater, and so we had serious concerns over whether the ground was dry enough to get there by ATV.
Led by Charles Cockell, and including Katy Quinn, Vladimir Pletser and Bill Clancey, the purpose of the mission was to place cosmic-ray dosimeters in both of those locations and to collect samples of rock-dwelling microbes for Charles’ analysis back in the lab.
Placement of such dosimeters will be a task needed on Mars, and is of significant interest here, since at only 140 miles from the magnetic pole, Devon is a locus where charged particle radiation from space is somewhat focused. The EVA lasted 3 hours and was entirely successful. The new high-gain backpack antennas worked well, allowing the EVA team to communicate back to the hab from 2 kilometers away with their dual-band transceivers on low power.
This was quite fortunate, because for some reason, when put on high power, the things run down their batteries here in a time much shorter than they do back in the Lower 48. I’ve noticed the same behavior from my digital camera. In 30 shots, the batteries are gone. It must be the constant cold.
Anyway, as things turned out, the crew was able to make it to Trinity without having to dismount from their ATV’s and hike. This allowed the EVA to accomplish its primary objectives ahead of schedule, so we gave them a go-ahead to conduct some auxiliary reconnaissance to start searching for a scientifically interesting site to deploy Vladimir’s geophone flute for another subsurface sounding experiment. They found a place within the crater near two converging streams that seems to be of some interest, but we are hoping for better.
Vladimir will leave after Tuesday, taking his gear with him. So the question is whether we can expect two acceptable weather days out of the next three, or just one. If we can reasonably hope for two, I want to spend one more day in further recon. But if the weather forecast Sunday morning does not look good, we will abort further searching and deploy the geophone at the next chance we get.
I received a message through Mission Support from my wife Maggie telling me about happenings back home. Our older daughter, Sarah, 18, is going down to Kennedy Space Center to help man the Mars Society exhibit of our soon-to-be-deployed Mars Desert Research Station that has just opened there. Our younger daughter, Rachel, age 9 and away at summer camp in Colorado, has just climbed a 14,000-foot mountain. They both make me very proud.
Messages from home will play an important role in any Mars mission. If the news is good, it can be an important boost to morale. But if the news is bad, the impact could be devastating. Figuring out how to handle such messages could turn out to be one of Mission Control’s most important tasks.
