Touch Down!

So we arrived in the Dome on Wednesday, and it was a great relief to finally get here. I wanted to share a few last photos from the mission training before moving on to the next bit of the adventure, though.

We started off training at Rogers Ranch, or Pu’u Wa’awa’a Ranch. Henk Rogers is the guy who technically owns the Dome, and NASA rents it from him. He also owns Tetris, so makes a bundle every time there’s some new phone that wants Tetris on it. He’s also very much into sustainability, which means that the energy systems here at the Dome, as well as back on the Ranch, were superb and there’s very little for me to improve on them.

From the Ranch, this is the photo I’d most like to share, because of how excited Big Liam would have been about it:

After the Ranch, we spent a few days at the Dome learning the systems there, and then went off to Volcano National Park for some geology training. Our final day of training was an excellent day where we all split into groups to map out a 4×4 km section of flow just outside the park. Here you can see my teammate (and XO) Sophie marking one of our GPS waypoints photographically:

And a few more photos from the day: