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Summary Report - July 30, 2003
Steve McDaniel Reporting
The crew convened in Ottawa on the evening of July 4, 2003. From there it was non-stop action. After slugging its way through Canadian customs, dealing with a crewperson injury diagnosed by Ottawa General Hospital emergency physicians as a serious right neck muscle strain, the crew departed Ottawa on July 5, 2003 around noon and arrived at our jumping off destination in Resolute later that day.
After a brief rest, the crew set about surveying our pre-shipped and pre-ordered supplies only to find that scientific supplies and certain food items were missing. A decision was made to supplement food with equivalent supplies from South Camp Inn and the local Co-Op. Testing of the satellite phone system was conducted and the mission was deemed a "go."
On the afternoon of July 6, 2003, the crew began the load out in stages. When the advance team arrived, they reported the FMARS Habitat to be in good condition and the volume and status of fuel to be sufficient for the entire rotation. The remainder of the crew, gear, supplies and equipment flew into Devon in back-to-back airlifts on July 7, 2003 commencing about 1430 hours.
After powering up the Hab, storing all equipment, and conducting those out-of-sim tasks such as weapons training, initial ATV training, and installation of equipment on the antenna tower, the crew formally entered into the simulation Wednesday, July 9, 2003 at 1830 hours. Some would stay in-sim for three weeks, while others rotated into out-of-sim duties. Immediately the crew began and rapidly completed in-hab training sessions including GPS familiarization, biology mission objectives and techniques, map-reading/local area familiarization, first aid/CPR, radio use and repair, and suiting up.
A first EVA to a close-to-Hab waypoint (Devo Rock) was conducted in order to provide an opportunity for more challenging ATV operations, training for and actual collection of biological/geological specimens, GPS usage, and radio communications. This trip left the crew with some concerns about long-duration trips that might encounter similar rugged conditions, particularly how best to achieve one of our long-distance objectives. It was decided to ramp up duration and difficulty of EVAs extending waypoints in each of the cardinal directions over those of previous FMARS teams.
Our month-long mission was filled with in-hab tasks and numerous EVAs. There was the effort to conduct a safety-first test of rappelling equipment. There was the highly pertinent medevac equipment and technique testing providing us with the input necessary to conduct a full medevac sim and testing of a novel suit stretcher. There were the wonderful outreach events including the MSNBC daily reports, newspaper articles and series in our hometowns, the interviews by Swedish radio and US National Public Radio, pre- and post-mission radio and TV news stories, and the ham radio outreach contact of persons like a Polish amateur radio operator near Warsaw.
There was the EVA to extend all previous FMARS westerly waypoints significantly, and to begin in earnest an aggressive biological sample collection, the 13th EVA conducted only slightly past the midpoint of the rotation. There was the awe-inspiring easterly route to the Thomas Lee Inlet, skirting native lands to a promontory overlooking that bay system. There was the southerly trip that laid out beautiful canyons and boulder-strewn streams to the eyes of our away team.
There was the human factors experiment that will provide substantial scientifically valid information to NASA researchers designing habitats and judging crew cognitive abilities. There was our full-crew trip to the Columbia Memorial erected by our fellow arctic researchers on a ridge rising northwest of the Hab and just north of Marine Rock. Another of our major efforts has been to produce substantial amounts of video of all of these aspects of the mission in order to produce a short film to be debuted at the Society membership in attendance at the Eugene Conference mid-August (www.marssociety.org).
Perhaps, though, the heart of the crew and its level of commitment to manned missions to Mars can best be described by the monumental effort it made to push to the North coast of Devon Island for the first time over a grueling 12- hour EVA.
The Push To The Coast:
After a weekend of careful planning, the first stage of a multi-stage "campaign for the coast" began July 14, 2003. The campaign was hampered to a large degree due to what appeared to be flu. But, the campaign gained significant ground when our navigation team overcame a lack of in-hab maps to extrapolate UTM coordinates for points along a best-probability-of-success route, with alternative routes. It was also assisted when our engineers rigged sunvisors for the helmets.
In our scouting missions to the north, we had seen areas of awe-inspiring beauty, but daunting challenge. We were rewarded on these scouting forays, but not without costs in equipment and fatigue. Our spirits were undampened for pushing our waypoints to the coast and the other three cardinal directions, even emboldened by the promise of what lay in the distance, but we were sobered by the difficulty of what lay ahead of us.
On Friday, July 18, 2003, the crew faced an important decision - push to the coast or wait for a better day. The night before, the weather brought in a pea soup fog, and the temperatures dropped. The flu had hit members that had been picked to be on the away team. There were many good reasons not to proceed. But, since weather reports predicted worsening conditions, and since the team was as ready as it would get, the decision was made to go, and the team swung into full motion, their resolve tangible. The energy of the seven-member crew warmed the EVA Prep Room, making it a place the away team would long to return to as soon as possible.
The previous scouting missions had given us every reason to believe we would have little problem in reaching the known waypoints, yet we were heavily loaded on each of the four ATVs. The ridges we had previously lumbered over virtually unencumbered were bone-jarringly the worse for our loaded vehicles. After at least 30-45 minutes of chin-busting riding, we cleared the suitcase-sized boulder field, breathing a bit better when the stones turned to grapefruit-to-basketball sized rocks with welcomed gravel patches between them. We were headed for Mac's Mountain, the promontory that oversees the Santa Claus valley, and arrived there through the use of the blackended permafrost watersheds streaming down the valley walls. Mac's Mountain presented us with several rough rides, but they paled in anticipation of cresting that final ridge, which the away team did four-abreast. We knew that this crest would likely tell us much.
And, there she was, the fjord, glistening in the fog-decked distance. This arm of the fjord lay in between amazingly high snow-clad cliffs on either side, plummeting into her depths (we have no idea how deep the seas were below the blue of the fjord, but if the cliffs presaged that depth, it was immense for this close to shore). The surface even from this distance could be seen to be virtually packed with icebergs floating starkly in contrast to the exact same blue of water as in the arctic sky above. The end of the fjord toward the sea and the other fingers of the fjord were blocked from our view atop the mountain where we perched. So, our eyes drifted downward to the realm that presently kept us from the shores of the fjord.
It was formidable but had promise. There were our friends, the blackened waterways, some of which were even headed in the right direction. There were the more kindly rockstrewn patchwork quilts. But, there were many, many boulder fields, the stone sizes of which were not discernible at this distance. Worse, there was a general steepness to this stretch we had not yet encountered. The land seemed to plummet to the sea. Were we merely backpacking, it would have been a challenge on foot. But, on heavily loaded ATVs (prepared as we were for the contingency of bad weather and for several days outing), hampered by our suits, helmets and backpacks, doubt dampened our euphoria in seeing our goal so close.
Again, the details down Mac's Mountain escape us, though there were numerous challenges until we decided the quickest way down lay through what we deemed Bear Pass. Bear Pass was formidable enough to break our normal togetherness and send down one man to determine its safe passage. He deemed it passable but hazardous, so we went down one at a time. What struck us most about Bear Pass, and I think it was an unspoken agreement among us, was that we could not imagine being able to make the traverse in the opposite direction. Another way up would have to be found.
After the 60 degree incline of Bear Pass, the way to the sea was relatively without obstacle. After an hour long ride to get there, it did not take long for each man on his own to walk to the sea's edge and touch the first of the massive bergs grounded in the pebbles of the delta in ankle-deep water. As far as the eye could see, the sea was littered with many, many thousands of these giants ranging from king-sized polar bear beds, to house-sized behemoths, speckled among them little calved bergs, some still afloat.
We spent considerable time in this special place; not one really wanted to leave. But, by this time, we were already five to six hours from the airlock, with that much time easily in front of us in the return. We made our way from the delta up to higher ground overlooking the fjord. There settled upon the crew a zen calm, engendered by the stark environment overlooking such unearthly beauty. There were long gaps of radio-silence, when the only sounds were the wind whipping out to sea around our suits, drowning out the steady familiar sounds of the fans from our simulated breathing backpacks.
At one point, we were blocked from vehicular progress and went ahead on foot. As we trekked back to our vehicles, we crested a ridge to look out over a boulder field covering the entire flattened cap of the prominence that had blocked our path. One among us pointed to the field's center at which stood in monument fashion a solitary stone resting upon an even bigger stone. It rose several times the height of any of the other stones as far as the eye could see in any direction. The stone's north face was covered in a red-orange lichen, like some obstinate neon sign flashing in a wind-swept ghost-town. It occurred to us that this amazing amalgam of fungus and algae was a lesson to those of us humans that would stand on the Red Planet, regardless of the dangers with which it may challenge us. We can persevere on Mars if we have at least the resolve of this lichen.
We will miss the fjords, inlets, canyons and rugged arctic terrain. But, we take comfort in the fact that the silent barriers that hampered our way, overseen by brilliant orange lichen sentinels, will remain a difficult goal for any but the strong of heart. It may be that few if any of us will see similar sights on Mars, but we take solace in the fact that our efforts at FMARS 2003 may make the adventures of the first men and women to Mars more feasible and safe.
On To Mars! |
