Journalist report sol 6
We learned a lot about technology today—what it sees from its own eyes, and how it has evolved. An earlier EVA started at 8:30, in which our Engineer, HSO, and Journalist (aka the millennial EVA crew) went out to the sea of shells and surrounding areas. The Engineer wanted to test a makeshift tent to use his 3D scanner in the field—he constructed it out of a bedsheet and two sawhorses—and release the shells he’d collected earlier back into the wild. Our HSO wanted to try flying the drone out to the Monolith, largely to get better images and to better determine its location for mapping. She had two batteries, the first of which managed to get the drone temptingly close to the object of interest. To uncover more of its secrets, she tried a second flight on sport mode, having a better sense of the best trajectory. As the drone launched, however, the winds picked up. The little drone battled gusts and its power drained unpredictably fast. The weather proved too much despite our HSO’s careful piloting, and the device performed a forced landing in an anonymous spot some 600m from our perch, sending a lonely, black and white, probe-like image from its final gasps on the ground. Knowing that the winds might make it even harder to find the next day, the crew calmly tracked their bootprints all over the Martian soil in search. The HSO found the thing after about 15 minutes. (She is its mother after all.) The Journalist managed to get some lowtech footage of the Monolith on her cell phone, aimed through her binoculars, and the EVA finished with some compass readings off Galileo Road, which doubled as another test for the Engineer’s Starlink.
The wind halted any other EVAs. We sat around the table after an ad hoc lunch (tuna melts for some) and completed our sixth 100cameras module. Then our Commander unleashed his box of tricks: a collection of old electron tubes, early transistors, and integrated circuits, including ones he’s worked on, to show us how technology—and the relationship between analog and digital tools—has shifted over time, become smaller and more ornate, yet no less impressive. We’re now digesting our spaghetti, having watched an episode of Moonbase 8, hearing the wind rush over the hab’s roof vent and remind us of the hostile conditions outside.