This week was all about the bridgehead phase for our AMADEE-20 Mars simulation. The containers arrived in Israel, with Gebrüder Weiß taking care of transport and logistics. Many helping hands were needed to distribute all the equipment to the designated locations in and around the habitat in the Negev Desert.

As always with large projects, despite all the elaborate and detailed planning, there are still some challenges to overcome on site. However, our experienced and well-trained team is ready to face any situation in order to carry out AMADEE-20 successfully. The WLAN infrastructure was set up, rovers were unloaded and made ready for operation, there was a team building event together with the ÖWF and the Israeli D-Mars team. Our very first all-female EVA with our analogue astronauts Anika Mehlis and Dr. Carmen Köhler took place, we truly made history.

Preparations were also in full swing at the Mission Support Centre (MSC). The members of our international team arrived one by one and, as probably everywhere in the world, the WIFI password was the information of particular interest at first. After having to postpone the mission for a year due to the pandemic, everyone was relieved and delighted that it was finally getting underway. It was a work-intensive week that was mastered with a lot of fun and motivation.

For us in the media team, it was especially challenging to sift through all the wonderful pictures that our photographer Florian Voggeneder has taken at the test site so far and to pick out the right footage for the press enquiries. But we were in the fortunate position of being able to draw from a large pool.

Starting tomorrow, the isolation phase for our six analogue astronauts will begin in the Negev Desert = “Mars”, which means that contact with the rest of the world for the six will take place exclusively via “Earth”, i.e. the MSC in Innsbruck. In order to simulate as realistically as possible, communication between “Mars” and “Earth” is delayed by 10 minutes. Another exciting three weeks lie ahead of us and we will report. :)

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