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February 17th

Ethan

What is the Mojave Desert like? Is it as hot as you thought it would be?
Any Animals?

Not as hot as I accpected. A lot of anamls.(most. lizerds) Two tips of lizids, hored toad and regulr lizid. We also saw a black betle and we saw a marage.

Alan

We drove out to the test site at about 8:30. The site is located on a fossil beach of a dry lake bed. The lake is in a valley formed in ancient (shallow) sea floor - the major rock types being carbonates(sediments) and basaltic. A surprise was the presence of numerous clam shells. The fossil lake was fresh water in the not too distant past.

We explored the area and saw a cople of lizards, a desert beetle. A surprise to me was the desert mushroom. It looked like a joke someone had made out of urethane foam, but it was real. What struck me most about the site was the quiet.

I did a telecon with live video of me with the rover in the background. Someone on the telcon asked which was me and which was the rover! The suit people were starting to get set up, so I got to see the suit, and I took a couple of snapshots which I will get processed later. The suit had a neat patch that showed the Astronaut and rover toghether, I couldn't resist teasing the rover people how the astronaut was real big and the rover was real small on the patch.

A team of the University of Arizona was also setting up a camera/arm experiment. The same model instrument is already on its way to Mars on the Mars Polar Lander probe. Ethan and I walked out on the dry lake bed and saw a mirage. He thought that a mirage was only in the eye of the beholder, and only one person could see it at a time. At about 1 pm they drove the rover quite a distance, to where the U of A team was photographing a trench. While this was going on teams of scientists were at different parts of the site taking measurements. It needs to be sunny for most of them. Although the sun was strong, It never got hotter than about 70.