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Day 2 - Monday 9 July 
Second day of work on Devon Island. The weather turned warm this morning, over 2°C, but rainy. I woke up early after sleeping more than six hours in slices of one to two hours. The reasons being, firstly a sleeping bag on a mat in a single tent, set up on rocks, is not the most comfortable place you could dream of and secondly, with the cold I found out that you go to the loo more often. So I had the dilemma of either staying in the warmth and holding on or dressing quickly and walking the 200 metres in the rainy wind to the outside toilet! Another reason for waking up early was to clean up, it is time to use towelettes to wash. This means doing contorsions in the tent to clean inaccessible parts of the body. My last shower was nearly two days ago and although it is cold, you sweat when working or getting in the tent. Well, I know we are not en route to Mars to discuss trivial matters but these are aspects of daily life that any crews visiting Mars would have to face. No bears in view so far and luckily I am protected by a special sign that my ESTEC colleague, Tammy Erickson, made for me. I am sure that any intelligent bear who can read will understand and go away. The first team is still in the Habitat and they had their first Extra Vehicular Activity (EVA) yesterday afternoon. As the rain turned heavy this morning, their next EVA was postponed until the afternoon. While their simulation was going on, construction work around the Habitat continued. We were asked to give a hand to lay a pipe from the Habitat to the small river running a few hundred meters away. It took Kathy Quinn, Bill Clancey, John Schutt and myself two hours to install 600 metres of plastic piping in this martian environment. We finished in time for lunch, a pleasant Inuit Anaq stew, made from beef, vegetables and a few other things that I prefer not to know about.
For example, last night after having verified the equipment for our experiment, we planned to do a dry run today in the Von Braun planitia, the flat plain in front of the base camp. However, as it was raining this morning there was no point in trying to detect water under the surface. Furthermore, the All Terrain Vehicles (ATVs) were needed to support the EVA of the first simulation team so we will try to do a dry run tomorrow. Bill gets the weather report from a Canadian Station that allows him to download satellite pictures of the area. For tomorrow morning, a cold front coming from the North Pole (not far from here) is forecast with temperatures of minus degrees, so additional layers of clothing will be needed to sleep tonight and to work tomorrow. Some words about science. We had a very interesting seminar on impact craters yesterday evening, given in the mess tent by Dr Gordon Osinski, from the University of New Brunswick, Canada. As we are staying on the rim of the Haughton crater, formed by a falling meteorite 24 millions years ago, it was most appropriate. This evening, Kathy Quinn will give a talk on Icesat, observing changes in ice sheet topography from space. This arctic research camp is a most interesting place to have talks like these. About 40 people, most of them scientists involved in life in space and Mars research, are actually staying in the camp. Another scientist from the USA this morning asked us not to clean or sweep the floors of the three main tents, as he intended to collect samples of dust accumulated over the last week and to compare them with the samples collected a week ago. This is to assess the microbial contamination of human crews in new environments. It is true that the environment is very dusty, even if it is raining regularly. As soon as it dries, the dust accumulates on clothes, instrumentation, computers and in tents. A word on the crew of the second simulation rotation. There will be six of us entering the Habitat tomorrow. The simulation team leader is Robert Zubrin, engineer, founder of The Mars Society and fervent advocate of manned Mars missions. Dr Charles Cockell, a biologist from the British Antarctic Survey and part of the first simulation team will stay on for the second rotation, together with Steve Braham, a physicist from the Simon Fraser University, USA, a specialist in communications. Bill Clancey, a computer scientist from NASA Ames, Kathy Quinn, a geologist from the University of MIT, USA and myself, all start our tour tomorrow. We should enter the Habitat tomorrow evening at 21:00 and I am looking forward to it. We have been asked to fill in a questionnaire by a team of investigators from the USA, in order to assess the human factors involved in living and working at the base camp and later on in the Habitat. We are all set to go and the scientific work will start full speed tomorrow.
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