Dispatch from Mars Society Arctic Expedition Robert Zubrin July 24, 2001

Our plan for today had been for a major motorized EVA to the northeast, but when we awoke it was
raining and blowing hard. So our plans changed. Today we would work inside.

In a way, the bad weather this morning was a blessing, because we had a lot of inside work to catch up on. The commitment of most of our manpower to EVAs over the past week had created a large backlog of unanalyzed and uncataloged samples. We were also behind on our reports. In addition, much of our equipment had begun to deteriorate, and we were running low on functional spares. On top of all of this, we had some new equipment arrive, and some time was needed to get it up and running. So an inside day was really in order.

Brent Bos using Beagle 2 Flight spare microscope to image EVA samples.

Charles and Cathrine spent the morning logging and cataloging all the rock samples, then they sat down and finished their long awaited science summary report. In the afternoon they split their efforts, with Charles blazing away in the lab with rock saw, grinder, and polisher, while Cathrine came upstairs to start drawing out by hand a combined terrain and geology map containing the sum of the knowledge of the surrounding area generated by our EVAs to date.

Christine spent her day doing chemical analysis of soil samples. Her results show the soil here very poor in nitrogen: nitrates, nitrites, and ammonia are all less than the lowest values determinable by her testing gear. This result is consistent with the fact that there are almost no animals here, who spread nitrogen compounds, and as a result, virtually no plants. The highly volatile nitrogen compounds were apparently blasted out of the soil by the meteor impact, and after 23 million years, the effect is still visible.

Photo of 400 mililon year old mollusk fossil fragment colected by crew on EVA and imaged by Brent Bos on Beagle 2 flight spare microscope in station lab.

Brent Bos is a graduate student working for Prof. Peter Smith, of the University of Arizona. Peter, who will be a crew member on the 4th rotation, is a coinvestigator on the British Beagle 2 mission scheduled for flight to Mars in 2003. He was responsible for developing the microscope that will be used on Beagle 2 – the first optical microscope to fly to Mars – and brought the flight spare (a copy) of this instrument to Devon for testing. Today it was brought to the station, and Brent set it up and started imaging our rock and biological samples under both visible and ultraviolet light The pictures are really beautiful, offering resolution of objects as small as 3 microns across (A paramecium is about 100 microns in size). I can’t wait to see the images its twin brings back from Mars.

I spent most of my day repairing our EVA equipment. The wiring in our spacesuit backpacks is too light to hold up under the kind of treatment we have been dealing them, and two of the units had failed. So I got out the wire strippers and soldering iron and did what had to be done. I also assembled a new pack out of unused parts. By late afternoon, we had 6 operational suits.

For the past two weeks we have been trying to do a voice interaction with the crowds coming to our soon-to-be-deployed Mars Desert Research Station currently on exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex. The exhibit has been a great success, with over 1200 people visiting it every day. But our attempts at interaction from here, meant to be a high point concluding the day at 5:30 PM eastern time, had consistently failed. One day our communication system would be down, the next day we would be fine but they would be shut down due to a hurricane. Yesterday all the technology was in place, but we failed to respond because I was stuck in the mud of Haughton Crater at the time. Well today it worked. I got their questions as simple text, taped a recorded answer, transferred it into my computer, and hit the send button for transmittal just before the deadline of 5:45 PM eastern time. Apparently the two-week series of glitches had created a sense of tension at the other end. When my answers finally played from the auditorium loudspeaker, there reportedly was applause.

Charles and Cathrine studying geological samples.

We got some deliveries here today. Among the most important were incinolet liners and wax paper. The incinolet is our toilet. It uses an electrical heater to incinerate human waste, thus reducing it to sterile dust. The system could be good for a Mars mission because it requires no water (A standard toilet uses 2.5 gallons per flush, about what each crew member uses here for everything in a day.). It does require power (about 3.5 kilowatts), but if the Mars mission has a nuclear reactor power supply, as it almost certainly will, that will be no problem. The only mass it requires is a kind of folded wax paper liner which you insert into the stainless steel bowl. You do your business on that, then hit a lever and the bowl below it opens up like a set of bomb-bay doors. Then bombs away, the stuff is dropped into the incinerator chamber below. The purpose of the folded wax paper liner is to keep the steel bowl clean.

Well, around the middle of the second crew’s rotation, we suddenly realized that we were about to run out of incinolet liners. The units were new to us, and we hadn’t realized that the box of liners sent with it were only a small sample. I suggested that we substitute paper towels, but Steve, expressing fears that such unorthodox practice could result in someone ending up with a hot tush, insisted that we revert to using a camp toilet (i.e. poop into plastic bags) instead. I rejected this course, because it would stink up the station. Fortunately, we located a roll (that’s ONE roll) of wax paper in Resolute Bay, which served as an interim solution. As of yesterday, however, that roll was close to its finish. But today we received two replacement boxes of incinolet liners, plus 4 rolls of wax paper forwarded to us by a Mars Society member in Edmonton. Many thanks to Mission Support for arranging this rescue operation in time.

Christine Jayarajah doing soil analysis in the lab.

(As an added plus, the timely arrival of new incinolet liners provided Cathrine with the translucent material she needed to start drawing her map.)

The other item that arrived was a treadmill exercise machine. Cathrine and I assembled it on the lower deck after dinner. I was afraid we would have no place to put it, as what with all the tools, the electrical bench, the geology, biology, and chemistry labs, Steve’s communication gear, glove box, EVA equipment, and other things, it is getting pretty crowded down there. But fortunately, the Canadian Mars Society member who picked it out for us (Darlene Lim) had chosen wisely; it is the fold-up kind that can be stowed away when not in use.

I don’t know why everybody likes treadmills for exercise. You can get just as much exercise running in place without a machine. But everyone does, and I’m no exception. We all got a kick out of using it. But I think that if a human Mars mission does decide to use exercise equipment, they’ll want to choose something lighter. This thing weighs a ton. But at least its sound drowns out the drone of Charles’ rock saw.

Lt. Colonel John Blitch, a crew member for rotation 4, has arrived on the island with several experimental Army telerobots equipped for exploration. Since Steve’s problems with his balky communication gear have required him to operate out of the station almost consistently, I am going to have Blitch act as substitute crew member for him during the daytime for the remainder of rotation 3. Starting tomorrow, we will have telerobots to help us explore. This should prove interesting.