DIARY OF A MARTIAN
I awoke hours before dawn, stretched myself into a lucid state and put on my shoes. I was ready to go to Mars.
On 2 November 2020 I boarded a plane in Newark, New Jersey, headed for Kona, Hawaii, ready for two weeks on ‘Mars’. But for me the trip to the Red Planet didn’t take that long, as instead of travelling 190 million kilometres (119 million miles) to the real thing, I instead journeyed to the HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) research facility, located on the slopes of Mauna Loa, a volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii, to take part in Sensoria M2: an analogue Mars mission. Follow me back in time to November 2020, when I left Earth and spent two weeks on the Red Planet.
Sol 1 (2 November 2020)
LANDING ON MARS
After a two-week quarantine, three COVID-19 tests and an arduous journey through two airports with a face mask, face shield and gloves firmly in place – as I departed amid the coronavirus pandemic – I finally arrived in Hawaii, hastily met my five Martian crewmates, tossed my bag in the back of the HI-SEAS van (a big, capable vehicle aptly nicknamed ‘the beast’) and buckled in, too exhausted to even realise exactly what I was in for.
For two hours I watched the Hawaiian landscape pass me by out the window – a tease, the humour of which was not lost on the crew. We laughed, foreshadowing the memes we would eventually create, which would read along the lines of ‘two weeks in Hawaii: expectations versus reality’. The view out the window turned from a lush green landscape to a
