Yesterday Evening, the Space Cadets headed to the John Anderson building for a public lecture celebrating 50 years of Human Space Flight! Our special guests included Anatoly Artsebarsky (fantastic name by the way!) a Ukrainian cosmonaut who provided us with an entertaining and fascinating insight into early space exploration. Next up was Alvin Drew, who has been with us on our journey throughout the week. Alvin discussed the final mission of the shuttle discovery in which he was a crew member and showed us some riveting footage of his experiences. Last but not least we had the inspirational Amber Gell, who convinced even the adults to change careers! Amber enthusiasm encouraged us to never give up and always follow our dreams. After an insightful question and answer session, we proceeded to the assembly hall, in the hope of entertaining one another at our “Open Mic Night”. Every team brought something different to the stage, with even Alvin and Amber taking part in a few of the performances. Harmony was as ever filled with talent (yeah right…) with our harmonious tunes … see what we did there? Anna G was a little star and was brave enough to go second up and give a wonderful performance on the flute, playing Flower Duet (solo, ironically!) But Anna was not the only member of team Harmony to take to the stage. Liam soon followed and showed us all the hidden diva within him, with his rendition of ‘Grenade’. Andrew also showed his musical side, taking part in a musical quartet singing ‘Hallelujah’! Neal was the last of team harmony to perform, and to our disappointment didn’t take to the stage with his famous walk ☹ (Which will be revealed tomorrow). However we forgave him following his brilliant performance of “In Principio”, if that’s how you spell it. Team Harmony would like to say well done to everyone who performed last night, you guys were awesome! We are now about to go participate in the ‘Mars Rover Challenge’ which requires us to simulate a mission to Mars. This involved seven jobs, some more difficult than others as we soon learned, navigator, commander, blimp pilot, drone pilot, rover driver, robot arm operator, and ‘spikey’ driver. We were greeted onto ‘Mars’ by raucous music, which served to increase our excitement. As the clock started we had a rather successful mineral identification challenge (Well done Liam & Lisa). However it all went downhill from there, as the challenges grew ever more difficult. The Evil Blimp decided to float to the ceiling and crawl around to rest on a lightshade, before finally doing what it was told, leaving Anna G extremely stressed and hating the blimp with a vengeance. Unfortunately for Neal, the drone’s take off site was placed right next to a desk, and on take off it careered into said table, destroying the motors and nearly destroying poor Neal. Following this eventful start, it got slightly better before going wrong again as it flew into a door, losing its precious cargo. Finally, after many attempts, we managed to land on the target site, (Wehey!!!). Despite Neal’s best efforts to control the dreaded drone, his hard work was slandered when we saw some PhD students fly with style with their own self constructed drone. This afternoon, we completed the Mars themed activities with the Mars Lander challenge. We were required to construct a landing system which would protect a raw egg dropped from several metres. Safe to say, despite the egg remaining intact, our landing was an epic fail, flying far off course. We enjoyed a live lecture from Chuck Lloyd in Houston in which he discussed the effects of zero gravity on the human body. He was also very willing to answer the many questions we had for him, ranging from gender differences to conceiving in space… Following the lecture, there was great excitement when we were informed of the long awaited arrival of our hoodies! WOOH! With the two bright orange hoodies, it is safe to say we are the brightest team (in more ways than one ;) ) Now to the sad task of packing before we head of to our Gala Dinner and Ceilidh. WHOOP WHOOP! Tune in later for the final installment of our epic journey! ☺