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Elaine Walker's Personal Journal - HMP 2004 Education and Public Outreach July 27, 2004 This morning there was shotgun training for the newcomers. That included the folks who came in on my flight, and the flight that came in on the 25th. Gordon "Oz" Osinski (a geologist from the Planetary Science Institute) and Samson Simeonie (Deputy Base Camp Manager for the NASA HMP/Canadian Ranger) lead us through shotgun training. They talked about the behavior of polar bears, what to expect, and what to do in the unlikely event of an actual bear encounter. Today was rainy. Cold, windy, soggy and rainy. Business goes on as usual at the HMP camp though, and in fact it was a big day for the DAME (Drilling Automation for Mars Exploration) Project. Brian Glass, Howard Cannon, and the Honeybee Robotics drill team were joined today by Sathya Hanagud and Massimo Ruzzene (both of the School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology). Sathya Hanagud and Massimo Ruzzene are developing software that will allow the drill to self-diagnose and self-correct problems that may occur on Mars. Their system is physically separate from the DAME software and involves a laser sensor to pick up the subtle vibration of the drill bit. The DAME drill crew moved their entire drill setup from the shakedown site one mile from base camp to an impact breccia hill within the crater, which Pascal Lee (SETI Institute/Mars Institute/NASA Ames, Project Lead for the NASA Haughton-Mars Project) picked out yesterday on our ATV traverse. A few of us traversed to the new site today after it was ready for drilling. This time, instead of the The Mars Institute's Mars-1 HumVee Rover serving as the support platform for their drilling work, they used the small white dome tent from base camp. We spent some time at the drill site, watching actual drilling, and learning about the vibration analysis that the gentlemen from Georgia Tech are doing. I take several pictures and video clips, then leave the tent to catch up with Camille to see if he has found any interesting periglacial features nearby. While Camille explains his observations to me, we happen upon a small bird's nest, nestled into a crevice on the ground created by polygon cross lines. I ride back to the NASA HMP base camp in the HumVee with Pascal and Pauline, letting Camille use the ATV I had been using. Oz shared some of his pictures with me (which you can see in the photo journal). Oz is posing with a rather large shatter cone he found in Haughton Crater. |