Dispatch from Mars Society Arctic Expedition – Robert Zubrin July 27, 2001
The weather is getting worse. The forecast for today was rain, sleet, and fog, with snow possible
tomorrow. Most of my crew needs to be on the 737 that will leave Resolute for Yellowknife Saturday
afternoon – the next flight out is Wednesday. So all plans for a telerobot deployment EVA to the cliff
across Devo Rock canyon were cancelled. Instead our program was to do our work today in the station
with most of our bags packed, holding ourselves in readiness for rapid pullout to Resolute on the next
Twin Otter flight, as it might prove impossible to get one on Saturday.
In fact, it proved impossible to get one today. So we ended up putting in a full day of work in the hab. Charles and Cathrine completed the logging of our rock samples. Then, while Charles wrote up their results as a kind of catalog, Cathrine continued her work of creating a combined terrain and geology map depicting the results of our survey expeditions to date.
Cathrine’s map is hardly complete; our crew was only active 10 days and there is much we have not yet seen in the surrounding region. So Pascal, who will lead rotations 4,5, and 6, may choose not to use it. His knowledge of the environs, gained through four summers of geological exploration here, is far more thorough. Yet the intimate knowledge of the island that is in Pascal’s mind is fundamentally a map like this one, filled in with the details revealed by the experiences of four summers of field work. But summers here are only 6 weeks long. By the 6th month of their 1.5 year stay on Mars, the crew of the first mission to the Red Planet will have surveyed the area around their base, and know it about as well as Pascal knows the region around ours. So if the surveys performed by our crew of relative Devon newcomers represented the kind of activity that might be conducted by a Mars missiz7‡üuring its first few weeks after landing, Pascal’s sorties will more fully demonstrate the kind of in-depth science the expedition will be able to do several months later, after the surrounding terrain has been scouted. I expect great things.
Christine spent most of her day doing further chemical analysis of soil samples, Brent reviewed videotaped data from yesterday’s EVA, and I worked on dealing with backlogged communications over logistics and other issues.
But John Blitch had a research program that needed the involvement of the entire crew. He wanted to find out what kind of people make the best rover operators, and to see if such abilities could be tested for in advance. Moreover, he wanted to do the testing on a group of people who are representative of the skill and character types one might actually send to Mars, and do it not when they are fresh as daisies, but when they have been fatigued a bit by extended field work, just as they really would be on a Mars expedition. For John then, our crew represented ideal test subjects. As this kind of research is quite important, we all gave him our full cooperation.
The tests started off with written exams in spatial abilities, memory, and pattern recognition. There were also problems that were kind of like tangrams on paper in which you had to try to determine which groups of shapes could be put together to make a certain pattern, and others where you had to predict how various three-dimensional shapes viewed from one angle would be seen from another. Ordinarily I’m pretty good at these kinds of tests, but I have been getting only four or five hours of sleep each night for the past several weeks, and so I found them a bit taxing.
Anyway, after the written tests he took us one by one down to the EVA preparation room. There he had set up a rover control station for Stumpy the tethered telerobot, who was positioned under the habitat. We were asked to drive the rover to three of the six habitat legs and find and read six little signs proclaiming habitat structure malfunctions that John’s assistant Arnie, operating outside the hab, had placed on the back of the legs and on the underside of the habitat floor. You controlled Stumpy with a joystick, and could also pan his camera eyes up and down and change the depth of focus. The images from Stumpy would be transmitted back over his cable and displayed on a camcorder viewscreen, thereby allowing you to drive the vehicle and search for and read the little signs. You had to do this micro-reconnaissance as fast as possible, with John timing you to assess your performance.
I found it relatively easy to navigate the vehicle, that is figure out where under the hab Stumpy was, and then set an accurate course towards the next major objective. But the ground under the hab is covered with irregular rocks of various sizes. While it was easy to tell which of the largest rocks represented impassible barriers that had to be steered around, I found it impossible to determine in advance which of the much more numerous small and medium sized rocks Stumpy could climb over and which would hang him up. So Stumpy kept getting stuck. Sometimes we could get him unstuck simply by going into reverse, other times we had to jerk him free by pulling on his tether. So the recon was a tedious process. I took 17 minutes to do it, other people’s times ranged from around 10 minutes to close to an hour. If the signs had been in places accessible by humans, any of our crew members on EVA could have done it in less than 1 minute. This exercise thus reinforced my view that the primary value of telerovers is not general exploration, but exploration directed towards critical sites not accessible by human astronauts. John will now attempt to compare his written test data with the rover operation tests, to see if the tests have any predictive value in revealing rover operator aptitude.
Dinner tonight was prepared by Cathrine, who copied my recipe from yesterday of spaghetti with (canned) tuna fish mixed in marinara sauce. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I was quite gratified.
This was our last night together as Flashline Station crew, so we held a going away party. We played Martian Chess in teams (with no consultation allowed between partners), while the boombox blasted away the tunes of Fleetwood Mac well into the AM hours.
We need to make it to Resolute tomorrow. Will a Twin Otter show up in time?
