Journalist report Sol 4
We’re celebrating the fact that our HSO won a grant from NASA today, announced just now on a Zoom (her background: the lower deck EVA suit formation). Before that finale, today was a functional, routine day on Mars, with only a few hiccups.
Our Commander made pancakes while our HSO and Artist caught the sunrise near the Observatory. The first EVA crew—HSO and Commander—set out to the Overlook to investigate a spectral, faraway geologic object of great interest to our Commander, the Monolith, which he first saw there years ago and has been trying to gain a greater understanding of ever since. He took a few compass readings this time, but he’ll be going back tomorrow, with the Journalist, to get more information in an attempt to triangulate its exact location on the map. Will it be accessible via rover? Will he be able to get closer to it via other means (drone)? Would touching it turn him into the dog that caught the car? Or would it change his life? The Journalist is very interested in the answer to this question. Their EVA was also dedicated to our HSO taking drone footage, especially new shots including the Commander driving in a rover.
The second EVA took our Engineer and Journalist out to Green Mars View so the Engineer could set up Starlink for his project, completing a Duolingo lesson in Spanish to test the connectivity. They trekked to a nearby ridge to search for, you guessed it, the Monolith, and they may have taken a zoomed in, blurry picture, but the Commander wasn’t sure. (Nothing is as it seems when it comes to this subject.) Otherwise, the two chatted for the Journalist’s magazine piece and took photos for the HSO’s 100cameras project. The two are also sorry that they came back a little late due to an erroneous 24hr time entered on the EVA request.
Meanwhile, our Artist prepared a fairly inspired pasta salad while the Journalist’s disappointingly bland loaf of cheddar and herb bread finished its boogie in the bread oven. After HSO’s NASA triumph—only interrupted by a tiny wifi outage—we gathered to appreciate his work. It’s worth noting, too, that our HSO’s funded project has to do with mushroom growth in space, while the Journalist (so far) can’t manage to grow a blue oyster mushroom in the GreenHab.