Mission Support Journalist Report 08-12-01

Mission Director: Tony Muscatello
CAPCOM: Katya Muscat
Engineering Officer/Journalist: Dewey Anderson

Dewey showed up at 3pm and began sorting and filing email messages left over from the day before and the new messages for the day.

No "Mission Support online" message was sent at first because some of yesterday's email made reference to Mission Support having the SirCAM virus again and it was not clear that that had been resolved.

Katya arrived at 3:30 pm and took over CAPCOM duties.

Gary Snyder, of Pioneer Astronautics came in and mentioned that the SirCAM virus had been scrubbed yesterday.

At about 3:35 Tony came in wondering if we had heard from KSC yet. We had not.

Tony verified that the virus had been handled yesteday.

A minute or so later, the questions from KSC came in. Robert Zubrin came in and answered the questions and we sent that on to KSC. We recieved a reply from KSC at 3:56 saying that they had received answers and played them. They did not specify if the answers they played were ours or from the Field Team. (Later email from the Field Team made it clear that they had missed the interaction.)

Tony had Katya go ahead and send a "Mission Support is up and running" message.

The day's "hail" message from the Field Team indicated that they might go EVA later. This implied but did not state that there might be no reports from them during this communications window. At 4:10 Dewey sent a reply to this asking for clarification on this point.

Dewey looked through the pending messages from the Field Team and listened to an audio report from the Field Team. This had some questions regarding a weather station that had been sent up there but that arrived broken. Another email regarding this from the Field Team was copied to Gary Snyder and he provided some input directly (i.e. not through Mission Support).

An engineering reply was sent with regard to some issues in the audio report and another to the email about the broken weather station. They asked about some connectors for the guy wires on the hab that they couldn't find. At their request, we asked Dr. Zubrin if he knew where they were but he did not. He called Frank Schubert to see if he knew but just left a message. Frank was also emailed about this.

There was still no response from the Field Team at 5:15. Dewey sent a message saying that the lack of response would be taken as an indication that the Field Team was not participating in a dialogue today.

Dewey filed the day's messages.

At 5:53 pm MDT, seconds before Mission Support was to shutdown a message came from the Field Team saying they had been busy with people from "Grise Fiord". Dewey responded to some points in that email and asked for what plans they had for further communications today. (This was sent around 6:20 pm MDT).

Email came from Lorraine at KSC answering some questions about KSC procedures. Dewey replied to this and tagged on some questions about the Mars Suit sizes that the Field Team had asked. He also sent Patty Pietu an email asking about the suit sizes.

At 6:45 we received an "End of Day Report" from the Field Team. Tony Responded.

Tony and Robert Zubrin saw Lorraine's response from KSC and had a further response to her.

Mission Support shutdown at about 8:00 MDT.