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Planetary News: Mars (2005)The Planetary Society's Mars Analog Blog:
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Credit: Troy Hudson |
Party in the Desert
Yungay station, 4:28 pm
Andrew was in the city last night, so I had full use of tent, which included full use of his sleeping bag, blanket, and inflatable mattress. Despite this, and an extra heavy blanket Chris had, I still froze my butt off. Apparently it got down to -5°C (41°F) last night. Yeowch!
Chris and I got up early and headed out to the Rock Garden site shortly after the sun rose. We set up the infrared camera on a westward facing slope and took some time lapse shots of artificial wetting events we induced. It was simply a matter of using an insecticide sprayer to apply a thin layer of water to the soil, simulating early morning dew. The camera saw this quite well and we took movies both before and after the sun hit the soil patch we were examining.
The viewing geometry we had was not optimal (June3: Setup1-2). Once the sun rose high enough to illuminate the camera itself, we got a bit of glare inside the lens and I fashioned a sun-shield out of notebook paper and electrical tape to minimize this. And once the soil began to be illuminated, the contrast between light and dark areas jumped up and the visibility of wet patches was significantly reduced.
View From Rock Garden Hill
Credit: Troy Hudson |
I tried attaching the 1480 nm filter to the front of the lens with a makeshift (i.e. cardboard) filter holder. It seemed to work quiet well, though we can only see through the center of the field of view. The movies are good, but I’m not yet sure if they tell us anything beyond what can be seen with the naked eye. What we need is a real, natural dew event so we can observe its evolution at sunrise. Problem is, it’s been largely clear the past two nights with only a minor mist and frost in the morning. Hopefully that’ll change before we leave.
Troy working
Credit: Troy Hudson |
The TECP was not behaving itself. (June3: TECP) I couldn’t get the test program to give numbers other than zero. Several permutations of connection methods later, I got the readings to be all 333.62…but that wasn’t right either. One time, it all seemed to behave correctly, but by the time I got the thing back in the soil, it was back to zeros. So, that all got packed up and sent back to the station. Later that day, I set it up back at the station and it worked perfectly! The only thing worse than getting a problem you can’t solve on-site is getting a problem you can’t duplicate back home on the lab bench! I wrote down exactly the procedure I used for putting things together. We’ll try it tomorrow and see if we can’t make it work.
Most of the rest of the afternoon was spent extracting the images and movies from the IR camera computer, taking a shower, relaxing in the sun, trimming down my photographs from my digital camera, reading David Sedaris, preparing the WP4 soil moisture analyzer, and listening to Moby. Things are ramping up and I’ll hopefully have a lot of usable and useful data before I leave. Tomorrow may be a full day out in the field. I may set up on an eastward facing slope and spend the entire day taking data; possibly the entire night.
That’ll be quite a challenge, especially with as cold as it gets here. Sleeping in the car sounds a lot more attractive than sleeping in a tent, assuming I have enough gas.
Current Mood: Pensive
Current Music: Moby, Jam for the Ladies
Yungay station, 8:09 pm
We’ve had a pretty nice evening here at the station. I got the WP4-T Water Potential analyzer up and running and am now running a calibration standard. There’s a ton of people around here tonight, including a film crew from Discovery Channel Canada. With all this activity, and the heat from the spaghetti dinner cooked in the kitchen, it’s decidedly cozy even in the breezeway in the middle of the station.
A Bedroom
Credit: Troy Hudson |
The Signing Wall
Credit: Troy Hudson |
The biggest catastrophe of the trip happened yesterday. Lauren, who’s been an absolute saint so far this entire trip, got into a car accident last night. He rear-ended a pregnant woman at an intersection where the traffic pattern had changed not less than 3 hours ago. (They installed a new yield sign and did not include ‘new traffic pattern’ warnings.) Even Benito, who works for the University here, almost had an accident at the same intersection.
Lauren is okay, but he totaled the truck, and has the whole hassle of courts, police, etc. to deal with. He’s here tonight though, and all seems well. It’s just one more hurdle we have to work around.
The spaghetti we had this evening was decidedly bland. Nothing against Clay’s cooking, but he doesn’t have any spices to work with other than pepper and salt. What I wouldn’t give for a handful of fresh basil and oregano, and maybe a bit of thyme. Nonetheless, I’m feeling fat and sassy and am enjoying the last of my wine. Yum.
Current Mood: Satiated
Current Music: Better of Alono remix, Alice Deejay
Yungay Station, 10:50pm
Beautiful night.
Evening seminar
Credit: Troy Hudson |
I spent some time tonight teaching people the various constellations we could see. Most of my knowledge terminates at the Milky Way, but I don’t feel too bad about that since most of the southern hemisphere constellations are boring or indistinct anyhow. (Yeah, yeah – I’m a northern hemisphere chauvinist, so sue me.) Didn’t see any shooting stars yet, but we did see the Large Magellanic cloud and the Zodiacal Light quite clearly. The Southern Cross looks spectacular. We could also see Venus at sunset and Jupiter was almost directly overhead.
There was also a semi-impromptu seminar in the kitchen given by a gentleman named Armando about hypolithic (beneath rocks) bacterial and algae communities.
Current Mood: Knowledgable
Current Music: crickets…oh wait, there are no crickets here. No bugs of any sort for that matter, although I did see a moth tonight.
[ what is this? ]