Date and time: 27 April 2012
Written by: Haritina Mogosanu, Crew 118, Commander
Very bright day today and very beautiful. Half of the crew went on new geological adventures in the land of 'Oh My God' the other half stayed home tied to house duties which included the 'space chores'.
The away team found more thrills and new sensational landscapes to photograph. (The general consent is that the beauty of the place is only matched by how much you discover every day. We all saw amazing things before but here they seem to be never ending.)
And since we are talking about discoveries, the other half of the Crew 118 went to assess the new site for the observatory.
Since the radio earpieces did not work properly for some reason this time, we could only hear a faint sound and resort to all sorts of hand gestures to communicate, quite hard to perform with the gloves on!! We took two panoramas at two places, measured distances from the hab, altitudes, made the GPS devices work hard and marked the locations with waypoints!
When the away team returned we also had dinner cooked by Annalea and Bruce and supplemented with a first class satay sauce prepared by my First Officer whom I would have recommended as Chief Cook had he not been already First Officer. If you ever go through New Zealand and happen to stay at his lodge, ask him for the sauce!
Before and after dinner the Commander fought with the secondary telescope also known as C - 4 in a Commander against Machine rage and won!
I was very close to lose as the delivered equipment had two screws that did not fit in (they were the wrong size) luckily we found the right replacement for them inside the tool boxes - by the way I love the tool kits at MDRS they are such a delightful sight to look at!
(Yes they were in deed the wrong screws and I am a real engineer albeit horticultural!) Which reminds me we need to check on the sprouts as they are growing bigger every day. Last year we did not have them and I would have given anything to eat any green apex of any sort!!
...
Jon Rask arrived around 2000 hrs and so we greeted him with joy in anticipation for tomorrow. He is going to give us an overview of the entire geological features of MDRS and promised to take us on a field trip to the Henry Mountains (same Henry Mountains we see far far away from the Hab).
The sky looks clear and if I have any luck in balancing and polar aligning the telescope tonight we may get to see some awesome places in the Universe! Hope that the wind will keep low!
Commander Mogosanu of the Starry Wrench (The best tool to polar align the pier of the telescope)
ENDS.