Coming in for a landing! This time I'm ready to take a movie.
The first Twin Otter of the day arrives to drop off four new people. There will be another flight later in the day.
Looking over to the left...
The pilots of the Twin Otter, Reese and Trevor.
Alain Berinstain, Steve Braham, Trish Garner, Keegan Boyd, Matt Bamsey and Thomas Graham pose for a photo op.
Each year new participants are awarded the NASA/Haughton Mars Project patch for the year when they depart Devon Island.
Greg Pisanich, from NASA Ames Research Center, is awarded his patch.
After the HumVee returned from their traverse, I suited up and we did some more filming for the music video. Pascal drove the HumVee while Sam filmed me lip synching in it. I was sitting on the front hood for the second verse which was fun. Kimik kept trying to get into the shots.
Here I am pushing a ground penetrating radar cart. Pascal has put a Haughton Mars Project sticker on my costume.
The blue devices are sensors and they measure the acoustic echos from the subsurface. They are called geophones. Graduate students from the University of Calgary are using this equipment for their research.
Four of us went on a fairly long traverse into the crater. We know the weather will get worse and want to take advantage of the nice weather before the rain starts.
We drive past the Mars Society Habitat that was built in 2000.
On Devon Island we stay on the worn paths, and only venture off of the path to do U-turns, or on extremely rocky areas where our paths won't be visible to aircraft.
Looking into the crater we can see the grey colored breccia. The view is breathtaking!
It is very hard to get a sense, through these phtos, of the scale and vastness of what we are seeing.
Brian Glass is leading us in this traverse. He is taking gravitational measurements in several different places within Haughton Crater with a gravity meter.
Addy, Stan, and I go on the four hour traverse with him and do plenty of sightseeing along the way.
Our ATV ride is rather rough. We're crossing fields of large, angular rocks, streams, mud, and steep hills.
We take the traverse rather slowly so Brian's delicate gravity meter doesn't get damaged.
No loud sirens and horns here!
Wow! This looks like an alien land. There were more greens and reds on these circular shapes than this picture really shows.
I really want to ride down to that circular shape and see what it looks like up close.
We all want to just ride our ATVs around like kids, but we have to stick to the paths!
We finally make it to Trinity lake, which was one of our main goals. It turns out to be more of a pond. Most of trinity lake is slightly to the left of this picture.
There is a surprising amount of plantlife in the crater. You can see the green accross the middle of the picture.
These pointed shapes are chimneys that resulted in the aftermath of the asteroid impact 23 million years ago. This particular chimney is a bit larger than it looks in this picture. I meant to bring along my swiss army knife to show the scale.
This orange bacteria is lichen.
Stellaria Longipes
It was really neat to see this ejecta block in real life, after seeing it in so many pictures and in Pascal's lectures.
Brian Glass tells us about the eject block, and the formation of the crater in general.