Commander's Report
Date and time:28 April 2012
Written by Haritina Mogosanu, haritina@marssociety.org.nz, Crew 118, Commander:

Today we had a first attempt to connect at with the operation Antipodes in Austria, where another MDRS commander Gernot Groemer (AustroMars 2006) is trialling his Aouda.X Mars Suit in the Dachstein Caves. The link was made via skype (which took our entire bandwidth) but we could say hello to the entire Austrian press present at the experiment and introduce MDRS and our work here.

After Aouda we had breakfast and our normal briefing together with our special guest Jon Rask. After planning the field trip for the day and loading up the snacks and water we left for what was announcing to be a great trip. It was an amazing journey that made me reflect once again on the importance of organizing field trips such as this one. It was an extensive learning curve and we saw Lith Canyon, Box Canyon, the area around the hab and the Henry Mountains with new eyes. The training today put everything into perspective and although I wish we could have had the chance to do it on the beginning of the rotation I was very happy that it happened and so was the crew. The very object of KiwiMars is to be a two weeks long field trip so that we could take forward to New Zealand the learnings from here and apply them to our own conditions. If we have very clear in mind how to approach this then the knowledge transfer to the students is done much easier. Today was one of those days that facilitated the process of structuring the information and putting things into perspective.
The peak of the day were the Henry Mountains and seeing the different geological eras - something that some of us don't get to see every day.

After the trip we returned to our BAU (business as usual activities). I was also very pleased that I could find a feasible solution to the telescope balancing issue where I used some dumbell weights (believe it or not there is Dumbell Nebula in the sky as well) on a longer screw and attached them to the scope. They fit like a glove. Tomorrow will finalise the alignments and mount the camera. The sky tonight was amazing and took plenty of astrophotos through my camera.

Clear skies from Mars

Ad Ares!

Haritina Mogosanu
Commander KiwiMars 2012 (Crew 118 MDRS)