18.11. Chitchat with Dr. Camarda

Hey!
Tonight our bioMARS had a chance to speak with Dr. Charles Camarda, as he is one of our main specialists and teachers during this Epic Challenge. Of course we had talked with him previously, but to have a personal chat to tell about our recent work, and to ask more specific questions was very nice.

<- Here are our faces right before starting the chat. The photo is blurry because the photographer must've been shaky from excitement. ;)

After that we had a Q&A with Space Veggies, whose mission a few years back was very similar to our goals. They kindly answered our questions and were also interested in our challenge and progress.

Bye now!

11.11. Q&A

Hey guys!

This Wednesday was partly a Q&A with ISRU expert Mr. Garrett Carman, and partly discussing about our communal knowledge on plant growing and food properties.

ISRU stands for "In Situ Resource Utilization", and that means making what we need from where we are and what we can take from there, for example, on Mars. We talked about creating energy and material, like glass fibre from the regolith or soil. Thank you, Mr. Carman, for answering our questions!

We will now make lessons for each other considering our challenge, so everyone learns from everyone and in the end everyone knows everything. ; )

4.11. Deep (Mars) diving

Hello!
It's been a long day, it's 8:30 pm again, and we started leaving the lecture. Only the girls stayed to take a picture for you guys to see our tired but happy faces.

What is our agenda now? In November we will dive deeper in our specific challenge (of growing food on Mars) and actually we had a nice way of rephrasing that to make our new problem:

0. “To develop an Earth-independent Food Production Capacity Increasing System”

0. In short, EFPCIS.

0. This is beautiful, we'll go with this one. 

0. Also, check our Facebook-page for our upcoming ABC's!

3.11. Sauna

Hey! Tonight our team and the Team Red Sandbox, were invited to sauna by our online working/ learning environment developer, Arcusys! 

The night also included us talking about the online environment, and together making it more suitable for our needs. For more information about the company, visit their site here.

NOW that is November already, we start focusing on our specific challenges, and that means reading a ton of articles and information. We try to keep you updated, thanks for the support! :)

Remember to stay warm in the cold Finnish autumn (or if you're not from Finland, still, go to a sauna if you can, really)!

31.10. Happy Halloween!

Trick or treat! 

Tonight we decided to leave studying for a moment, and celebrate a little. We went to one of our team members home, Krista's place, and carved some pumpkins, ate some apple pie (made by Kristina) and shared some laughs about life in general. Can you recognise some characters from our group picture? 

 Carving pumpkins can get a little messy, but the results were great! One pumpkin was a little stinkier, so we carved it outside to ease the pain. The finished Jack-o-lanterns have a alien/space-theme, and one has our logo on it! 

Timo played a little guitar for us, and here's also a close-up of Mariia's costume, how cool is that! Our group wen't artistic with all our costumes, even the finnish people (Halloween is not very Finnish); Sonja, Jesse, Timo, and Krista!

                             

                         

Here is also a picture of a little party-crasher, Maul, with the Jack-o-lanterns!

We're all hoping everyone's Halloween is more treats than tricks,

Yours truly,

28.10. Lesson and presentations

Good morning! Yesterday (28.10) was a long day, we stayed and studied till half past 9 o'clock PM.

First we learned about information searching, Janne Hietala from Arcusys was kind enough to come and educate us. The information about searching for information was new for most of us, and super helpful for the future. Thanks!

This was also the first time we met after publishing our first drafts of our Mars-presentations, so we talked about them, and asked more questions from each other.

Now we begin working on our presentations again, making them (hopefully) better. Everything is possible after a good night's sleep!

21.10. Work hard, play hard?

Hey!

We and the other Epic Challenge team, "The Red Sandbox" went and watched the movie The Martian yesterday!

Afterwards we talked a little about the differences of the movie and NASAs real Mars plans. We sure hope they're not sending Matt Damon there, he seems to get into a lot of trouble in space.

But we enjoyed the movie and suggest You go see it as well!


PS. About our current workflow, we are individually studying different Mars-themes, which we will then (at the end of the month) teach to each other!