Regardless of mostly relentless rain, participants moved forward with their research.
The K10 Robot team from NASA Ames, led by Dr Matt Deans and including Dr Trey Smith, Susan Lee, Vinh To, Eric Park and Dr Hans Utz, tested instruments and components and traversed with the robot during a break in the weather. Kelsey Young and Byron Adams (both PhD students in the Geology Dept. at ASU) did traverse planning for this year’s follow-up mission. The robot team will program the traverse coordinates into the robot accordingly.
Ron Sidgreaves and Todd Glazier of Hamilton Sundstrand have almost completed the second suit and got started on the installation of two suit ports on the Mars-1 Humvee Rover; one for each back door. There will be some exciting research this season on this front.
This evening there were two lectures. The first was a dual talk by Drs Robert Ferl and Anna-Lisa Paul, both faculty at the University of Florida, in the area of space biology. It has been a very busy year for them, having flown life science experiments on various space missions. They have implemented a version of one of their experiments into the Arthur Clarke Mars Greenhouse.
Sean Alexander (City Bike / kowasaki.com) talked about the diverse history of Kowasaki, and also learned about his own colorful history and wide range of talents.