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To MARS with MER - RESEARCH/ers

Kobie Boykins
Mechanical Engineering section
NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Pasadena, California

Work hard, play hard!
There's been some long days where we've had some operations that were very critical that we started in the morning, and it was a long lift operation and those lift operations may go well into lunch time: we'll break for an hour, and then we'll come right back and try to finish the operation in a long day, so that may be a 12 to 14 hour day. But those have been few and far between.

The way you get yourself psyched up is that, you know, look at what's going on behind you (in PHSF.) You wake up in the morning and you say, this thing is going to Mars, and that just in itself is a huge elation.

And the people that we're working with, there's lots of other engineers and technicians and the management, and all of us are in this together and waking up in the morning, and going, Hey, that guy over there is putting in his 110 and 120 percent, and I should be doing that too.

The other thing we do is, every once in a while, we'll break away from here and get together. I've been organizing some bowling, and we've been playing basketball, and a lot of the guys who go fishing, or we'll get together and have a party, and maybe even a poker night, and we have fun together as well. We "play" hard in here and work really hard, but then when we get out of here, we'll get together as friends and just have a good time as well.

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