|  | Devon Island at dawn | |
Day 1 - Sunday 8 July
9 July 2001
The word to use is UNBELIEVABLE. We jumped in the plane at 01:30 this morning after two hours sleep and after loading ourselves, the luggage, boxes, crates on to the plane. By 02:00 hours we were off in bright sunshine in this old Twin Otter aeroplane, which has 10 seats and cargo space at the back. The flight itself is only 45 minutes, but it is like entering another world.
As we left one island for another, all the expanses of water were frozen except for some water flowing between cracks; not a patch of green, only rocks and snow. After a silent flight without a single word,as everybody was so mesmerised and anxious to arrive, we finally saw on our right, as the plane began to lose speed and altitude for landing, the Habitat. It is 03:00, the sun is still high and bright, and we are in this Martian-like environment, with rough-hewn rocks all over and this futuristic Habitat only a few hundred metres away.
We are welcomed by John Schutt, the manager of the base camp, and Joe Amariluk, the head of the guides. Both are on their ATVs, the only mechanised moving vehicles in this land. The luggage is quickly transported to the base camp and we are shown where we can set up our tents.
I am so impressed by the scenery that I can not take my eyes off the horizon and keep looking around, comparing this rock with that one, and this snow patch with another one. I have read so much about it on the website of The Mars Society and here I am in the middle of it. I still cannot believe it.
The base camp is composed of three large tents: the mess, a working tent and the studio-tent of the Discovery Channel personnel. Two additional tents are a little bit further off which are for personal use, to do - well you can guess what. Funnily enough men have to use an emptied fuel tank outside. Further on is the tent village itself where individual tents are mounted.
| | Mars Arctic Research Station | |
So, here we were at 04:00 trying to set up our tents. As the last time I set up a tent was more than 25 years ago I was happy to receive a hand from my colleagues. Again, I could not go to sleep and decided to wander off around the camp. What a majestic impression! What an unbelievable feeling to be in this out-of-this-world environment.
Eventually I go back home to my freshly mounted tent to download photos from my digital camera to my laptop and then it struck me. If a friend had told me 20 or even 10 years ago that in 2001, I would be sitting in a tent in the middle of a Martian-like environment at 04:00 in the bright sunlight, downloading digital images on to a portable laptop, with no electrical connection, I would have asked in which SciFi movie they had seen that.
After breakfast we introduced ourselves to the other members of the expedition. There are a group of engineers and scientists from the Carnegie Mellon University with a robotic rover experiment, several groups of journalists from Discovery TV USA, Discovery TV Canada and the Popular Science magazine; a group of Biologists working with NASA-KSC; and the NASA-Haughton Mars Project group. In total about 40 people, three dogs and a lot of portable computers, cameras, radios and shotguns.
We are instructed on how to use handheld radio transmitter receivers (remember the call sign HMP7SFU), on how to ride the ATVs (basically like a motorbike except with four wheels instead of two) and on how to use a shotgun. It is explained to us that polar bears are moving about free and hungry, that they may well be hunting and that for them we are meat on feet. So if they starts to charge at an average speed of 20 metres per second do not even contemplate running away!
If we go on an expedition or simply out of the camp we are supposed to have at least one shotgun within the group. We are told how to load, aim and fire, a process that I must say I did not enjoy too much. I still think that the world would be a safer place without them, except maybe for wild places like here where you are not on top of the food chain!
Lunch is served at 12 noon sharp, is quite nice and certainly more than welcome. It is rice with a choice of chicken in white sauce or chili con carne. In the afternoon the weather started to deteriorate with a cloudy sky and some wind. Remember that we are only in tents, so additional layers of clothing are needed to be able to continue to function.
Later on this afternoon we plan to open the boxes and to go through the instrumentation for our geophysics experiment. Tomorrow we will try to do a dry run before we actually enter the habitat on Tuesday night.
| 
