Sharing fresh radish with precision

Keeping steady is not simple; we as individuals have ups and downs and our mood may fluctuate, but as a group we keep level, moving forward like a flock of birds. And like a flock of birds that must look for the ascending thermal currents that keep them flying high, once one of us picks up energy and height, the whole flock knows "where the thermal is", and all of us go up.

The environment wants to take a piece of us, sometimes with the most lonely, stressful, or monotonous days we have experienced in our lives; and sometimes it LITERALLY wants to take a piece of us, like this experimental exercise machine that has been trying to play Dr. Guillotine with our fingers for a year. Nevertheless this crew gives all these big and little factors a hard time when they try to rain on our parade, with ingenuity, patience and hope in the future.

You naturally have to enjoy what you do in order to keep doing it. Some of the cooler things that are more likeable and never get old are the "spaceship driving lessons" where we learn to dock to a station, or the experiments in which the scientists like to share the results with us so we get to understand better the place we live in and learn some more science on the way, even eventually improving the experiments; and there are a handful of experiments instead that just do not like to be liked, such as those that involve a pain/discomfort which are ok for some months, but later can only make you wonder if you could go and pursue a career as a fakir. Nevertheless, it's all part of the package, we like to do it for the greater good and are sure that in the future the results will be worth it, and the harder it is, the more satisfactions there are.

Free time, on the other hand, needs to be spent in an enriching way, reading, obtaining new skills, keeping the old ones, filling every possible minute in a productive manner but also dedicating some of it to relax. There is a need to be balanced and to keep improving yourself.

Diego, Alexandr and Wang 'on Mars'

In the meantime we have learned lots about the dynamics of an interplanetary mission, the logistics, the interactions with the ground; one year of a valuable, unique, first-person perspective that has taught us a lot not only about a space mission, but about ourselves. Not to mention this is the year we walked on Mars! I mean how cooler can it get than a year in which you can say you walked on Mars.

I already thank all the people that have supported us thus far and that I know will continue to support us during the remaining third of the mission: family (I love you), friends who enjoy entertaining our nights with crazy earthly stories, mission support - our umbilical cord to the real world - and the folks on twitter that make us company from far away during tough times, 140 characters at a time. I also can never overstate how much I am proud of our crew, so I thank all of them too for being such good traveling partners, or sputniky, like you’d say in Russian.

- Diego