more gravity

[jay]

After Pascal only brought back one reading from his Humvee traverse, I needed more... and Audie and Stan (from H-S) and Elaine wanted to see more of the crater, so I organized a traverse to Trinity Lake after dinner yesterday. If one finds a lake for the first time, one gets naming rights (subject to local governmental approval, etc.)... the local namespace is colleges and universities (I named "MIT Lake" last summer).

So we went out -- I ran seven new gravity stations, increasing the 50-mile area gravity database by 5% or so. Found a small anomaly in one location in the crater. And I showed my companions the ejecta block and ancient hydrothermal vents at last year's Site 11, as well as the breccia and the lake:



Earlier in the day, the Discovery Channel guys left... here they are persuading Elaine to try on the H-S suit (compared with her music-video costume, I guess).



They, the NASA-ARC Mars airplane group, and most of the greenhouse staff left yesterday...



The season is winding down... only a few more working days left here.

Good thing that we went out last night, as rain began around 4am. My new tent is leaking at the seams... I only had it one day before shipping it, so I've had no chance to apply sealant (needs to be dry and unoccupied for two days). My sleeping bag is wet. So I have garbage bags covering piles of stuff inside the tent.

Personally, I got a shower yesterday (yay!) so I'm moderately clean, and I did laundry and hung it out before the rain came. A bit down, though... AIM and email has been sparse this year, less than I can ever recall since 1998, when we only had a 2400-baud connection over a satphone, once a day. A bit lonely and disconnected, here... no physical contact or hugs since leaving home, and most email has been nasty-grams from work complaining about my travel or shipping arrangements here.

Comments

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

*hug*

It seems like such a remote place. Are folks sociable enough to make any real connections?

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

Professional-level, yes. But different organizations, and people... it's still "being at work", so there's little discussion of anything personal. Lots of technical talk... you would have loved the hour and a half after lunch yesterday, talking about kimberlite pipes and traces of impact craters and ocean-land tidal interactions, for example. Astrobiology, Mars exploration, spacesuit technologies, long-duration space medicine, biomimetic robotics... lots of geekery potential. Off-hours, its a bit like a special science camp ;-).

But... I have developed friendships with some colleagues here, but it has taken several seasons to get to know them well enough to drop the professional reserve.

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

Why not Lake Stanford? : >

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

Already used ;-).

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Oh, that first shot of the lake is amazing! Wow.

-J

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

Thanks :). And it really had that grey-on-grey look, I haven't enhanced the image at all. That was taken at 12:02am last night, so it's the literal midnight sun, low and filtered by clouds...

[purplejavatroll.livejournal.com]

It's nice to see all of the photos you've taken. I'm glad that you got more gravity readings, too.

pjt

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Elaine has posted many (better...) photos in her blog, see
http://www.mars-frontier.org/7_25_03/ (some have me in them, a rarity since I'm usually behind the camera)