Date and time: 24 April 2012
Written by: Mike Bodnar, Crew 118, First Officer
The alluvial wash from rivers can make for rich pickings when looking for clues as to the geological make up of a landscape, and when hunting for fossils.
When water flows, it washes rocks and other material along with it. Some of this gets captured on river bends, or gets washed up on the banks, or trapped on the bottom.
Alluvial areas, whether carrying existing flowing rivers or being ancient and dried up therefore make good scouting locations, as they contain a wide variety of geological samples. They are, if you like, a geological supermarket, stacked with a full range of local products.
So today, our first proper day on "Mars" we suited up in our spacesuits, checked our air flows, and ventured outside. We have with us a Martian Rover four-wheel drive vehicle which for the purposes of this mission we are saying is pressurised. However, to get to where it was parked we had to go in our space suits across the surface.
Once inside the rover we were able to remove the suits, and drive to a nearby area where water action had deposited a wide variety of rocks. We found petrified wood (ancient wood that has turned to stone) agate, limestone, and many other sorts of rocks. We also found some fossilised oyster shells, which could be anywhere between 65 million years old and 165 million years old, much older than anything past it's use-by date in normal supermarkets!
If a real crew in Mars ever finds similar shells they will have undisputed evidence that Mars once supported life.
While the expedition crew of four searched for fossils, the Health and Safety Officer and the Flight Engineer caught up on chores back at the Hab. The Hab is always humming with electrical equipment, water pumps, etc and needs constant tending to make sure it functions correctly.
Mission Specialist Annalea Beattie's twisted ankle is mending nicely, to the extent she was able to come on the rock hunting field trip today.
ENDS.