Date and time: 24 April 2012
Written by: Haritina Mogosanu, Crew 118, Commander
Our very first day of Mars SIM started with an EVA.
CDR Mogosanu, XO Bodnar, MSP Harley and MSL Beattie used the pressurised rover to drive to the Cow Dung Road Cattle Grid where they (Ali) collected the 100 peebles.
The peebles arrived safe at the base to be 'processed' (photographed and roughly catalogued) by HSO Ngataierua and transformed into resources for school.
We spent at least one hour to suit up (done the suits) which was a 'nouveau' experience - definitely doing this for the first time takes a lot of time.
There is always something magical about starting a SIM and getting the gear on, as if you were on the set of a science fiction movie or even on Mars. However to our disappointment the blazing hot temperature today (at least 36 Celsius) made it impossible to stay with the helmets on for the entire duration of the EVA. We tried but had to give up and become one with the water canister (but not 'sensus stricto'). And for one time (that I know of) the annoying and ubiquitous problem of the foggy helmets disappeared (before even removing them).
Due to the temperature issue I decided to keep calm and carry on with the outreach part of KiwiMars 2012 which took priority over the SIM. Which means will try and cover as many science experiments as we can; shifting the EVAs as early in the morning as possible will allow us more time to stay in SIM but even 1100 hrs (11:00 AM) is too hot for field trips.
Our primary mission is outreach. This can be done via many channels including real time social media plugins, blogs, video and strong visuals which must be attractive and communicate well to the level of the audience. When we started KiwiMars we had no idea if we could do do it; now I am extremely pleased with how we managed to achieve so much, in such a short amount of time with so little. Our Mission Support Site is definitely the "star" hub through which we keep in touch with our audience especially as we started putting it together only 3 weeks before we left. Given the circumstances of what we wanted to be seen by our audience versus the bandwidth constraints I can say that the countless hours of (volunteering) work we all put into preparing the mission have now paid out.
The Mission Support website was brainstormed by the project team and engineered by Mark Mackay. It can be accessed at www.kiwimars.org.nz/display/MDRSMS .
This is the place where anyone can watch the expedition almost in real time. Whilst we are doing our many updates about the great things we did during the day, Mark had to come up with ingenious methods to overcome the 450MB of bandwidth limit / crew. This means that during 20 hours a crew can only send/receive 450 MB. I know ... yes... it is 450 MB and on top of that MDRS has at least 6 video cameras where the public can watch what happens at the HAB. They broadcast pictures online every 3 minutes and their air quota is included in the 450 MB described above. We were told that on Mars can be worse so we have to deal with it. There is a four window hour from 0100 hrs to 0500 hrs where we can upload the rest of the data but you have to keep awake at that time of the night to do that! For everything else we installed supplementary applications on our individual computers such as Rubbernet for Macs and NetBalancer for PCs that are constantly monitoring the other application's internet usage. Everyone setup their iPhones and iPads to download as little data as possible - only the headers of the e-mails during day time. And yes we do have emergency allowances for real emergencies.
Thanks to Mark again, we could automate some things, for instance all events' updates are performed at night via the Flickr scheduler, some other things again, we could not. Especially ringing back home to say hi to my four and a half years old daughter proved to be one of those 
manual 'tasks' to perform at night. Which was the most important moment of the day for me. I would not have had that chance on Mars due to the communications lag.
The Mission Support website also allows students to link up with the mission from 1400 hrs to 2100 hrs (10:00 AM to 5:00 PM NZST) when the Comms window is open. This means that every school group coming at Carter Observatory Mission Control can jump online and ask us questions on the chatroll (Bruce is compiling them all). We planned to have direct video links as well but the bandwidth makes it impossible, so that idea had to be discarded (with a sigh) and resort to only 5 minutes Skype video comms window with Mission Control Carter (www.carterobservatory.org) which make up for all the rest of the quota. Today's transmission “weighed” 60 MB for 5 minutes but at least it worked! We will try and take short movies with an iPhones application called Lifestream and upload them after midnight and this is the best we can do! Our plan of acquiring a data card (to feed our data thirst) failed in the short time we had since we landed and we could not find any Verizon (which seems to be the only network working here in the middle of nowhere) data plan that would suit our needs. Many lessons learnt on how to "outreach" when constraints are everywhere! The key is proper planning and "dress rehearsal" - which is the entire reason why MDRS exists!!
Kia Kaha for another amazing day on Mars
ENDS.