February 21, 2018 Daily Blog

Today, Angelina and I were trying to see if we could determine what happened at the mars habitat (as we are now pretty sure that there is an electrical problem and we cannot send the habinots back in until it is fixed). Here are the electrical graphs day by day.

This is a graph from a normal day last mission to hold as a baseline for what it should look like. The lab bath is always running, normally below 0.5 kWh (I assume they were performing an experiment at noon. The kitchen power spikes at normal eating times, most likely when they are using the microwave. The living room plug fluctuates along with the heater, as we would expect, and the washing machine goes up only when they are using it.

This is the day before the mission started. After talking to Dr. Bill, it appears that no one was up at the hab, so the spike in living room power is something to look into. Everything else remains normal.

This was the day that they entered the hab. They started using the lab instantly, either setting up their experiments or checking how the system is working. They have dinner which explains the spikes in the kitchen, and everything else appears normal.

Once again, everything is running smoothly the next day. Note how the living room plug never takes up close to 0.5 kWh.

Same as the 16th. Everything seems to be running perfectly.

Everything appears to be running smoothly here as well. The kitchen spike is dinner and, they must have eaten food that didn't require the microwave the rest of the day.

Here is the day of the incident. Between the white lines is the time frame that we know Callum received the electric shock. All the power usage is spaced out, which is most likely when their power was dropping in and out, which is what Callum was going to fix.

Overall, my current theory is that there is a water leak in the power system. This could have caused the spike of power in the living room as it shorted out when the water reached there. It could also explain how Callum shocked himself. When he went to fix the battery, he could have touched the water or anything in contact with the water which, just like with a hairdryer, would have provided a powerful electrical shock.

I will continue looking at the graphs tomorrow and try to find more evidence of a problem.