Day 111
Mood:  party time!

Fuel processing on Phobos was finished over the weekend - about a week ahead of schedule. The help I gave Keith and Sumire on the project did contribute to its completion. As such, we spent a good deal of time working on the long-nonfunctional Phobos probe. So far, the probe looks reparable. But despite that, certain components that we didn't have spare parts for needed replacing. But thanks to Keith's genius, he was able to McGuyver some spare parts we had on the ICSE for the Phobos probe repair. In addition to that, we fueled up one of the MEM's with the fuel processed from Phobos. We got more interesting images of the Martian surface from the probes we sent there. And we got transmissions from Earth from certain world leaders congratulating our continued success at exploring Mars.

Day 105
Mood:  bright
It was another very busy day for us in Mars orbit. The samples from the sample return craft were brought on board the ICSE and then stored to be studied later. We got more images from the Mars rovers and related craft on and just above the Martian surface. And Keith and Sumire found a way to speed up the fuel processing. If they can get that done sufficiently ahead of schedule, we might have time to repair the Phobos probe. Sure, a lot of folks would say that repairing the probe would be a long-shot. But to that I say they said the same thing about sending people to Mars.

Day 103
Mood:  energetic
The sample return craft came back with a small sample of Martian soil today. Keith and Sumire spent most of the day on Phobos studying the returned samples. And at the end of the day, they found no evidence of microbial life. Just as I and certain other experts predicted. Nevertheless, there might still be life on Mars (though I am pretty much skeptical of that). So unless we find that life via the rover probes that are currently using on Mars, we’ll have to wait until the human Mars landing at the end of the month.

Day 99
Mood:  energetic
Keith and Sumire found the Russian Phobos probe yesterday! It was partially-buried on the surface of Phobos not too far from the fuel processing site. So far, it looks as if it's repairble! Today, I steered one of the rover probes toward the so-called "Pyramids of Elysium." Of course we all know they're not really artificial structures, so what better way to prove it than to send a probe there? Yeah, baby!

Day 96
Mood:  happy
Morale among the ICSE crew is pretty good today, and it's been pretty good for the past week or so. Among today's duties included more fuel processing work for Keith an Sumire, and more data analysis from the Mars probes for the rest of us. All of our tasks for the day were completed on schedule. And after another hard day of work in Mars orbit, we got to see excepts of the Rosa Parks funeral.

Day 94
Mood:  happy
It's now official. Keith Myerson and Sumire Esaki became the first humans to set foot on the surface on another celestial object besides the Earth's moon. While on Phobos, the two set up the fuel processing equipment as the remainder of the crew oversaw the operation from the ship's command center. The whole thing took a better part of the day, but we were able to get everything we needed to get done on schedule.

Day 93
Mood:  energetic
What was arguably the scariest part of the mission happened flawlessly. The aerocapture procedure put us in Mars orbit exactly as planned. There was a lot of shaking and quaking within the ship as we flew through the upper atmosphere of Mars, the ICSE seemed to have withstood the proedure undamaged. Kick ass!

After aerocapture, we spent most of the remainder of the day examining the Mars data being transmitted back to us by the various Mars probes and satellites we deployed a few days earlier. We were so ingrossed by the unending stream of data that we could barely concentrate on anything else. And that's why I say folks should go to Mars more often.

Day 91
Mood:  energetic
We were two days away from Mars, and we had some proverbial good and bad news for the day. The good news is that we successfully launched the four aerocapture vehicles at the front of the ICSE toward Mars. Those vehicles contained assorted Mars probes and two communications satellites. The bad news was that due to some complication I won't get into now, an EVA was required to resolve the jam-up of one of those modules after our telerobotically-operated probe broke down yet again. I did the EVA. After I fixed that cumbersome technical problem, preparations for entering Mars orbit.

Day 84
Mood:  caffeinated
Have I mentioned that we're close enough to Mars to make it out as the red disk that it is? From our current position, Earth looks like a pale blue dot. (And I've heard that before!)

Day 82
Mood:  not sure
We're less than two weeks away from entering Mars orbit. And so despite our interpersonal friction, we finally got our acts together and salvaged the mission. Or at least salvaged it as best we could. We still had the personality problems as well as technical problems. But since we're so close to Mars, we needed to focus on making sure the ICSE enters Mars orbit and not burn up in the Martian atmosphere or get bounced off into the depths of interplanetary space.