MISSION LOG – SOL 77
We found it!
It took a bit longer than I wanted, because our navigation system isn’t perfect and there are a lot of small craters and rocks here in Ares Valles. It’s like we’re driving across the face of an immense acne-ridden teenager.
But we found Twin Peaks this morning and drove towards the hills until we saw the lander. Or, at least, the bits of the lander still above the surface.
Forty years ago when Pathfinder landed, it landed on a mostly flat plain surrounded by small hills and craters. Since then, somehow, it’s picked up and held enough wind-blown dust to create its own sand dune. Only the masts were above the dust level when we arrived, and if the sun hadn’t hit one of those bits at just the right time we might have driven past, or even over, the old space probe. And wouldn't that have been the perfect ending to this trip?
Once we were sure what it was, we parked the rover, got out, and set up the solar cells for charging. Sure, we’d only done about twenty kilometers today, but we’d arrived, so why not get the charge back? Once that was done, Starlight and I began carefully moving the Martian dust off of Pathfinder .
Once we’d got down more or less to the tetrahedron panels, I took a moment to find Sojourner. It was almost right next to the lander, as it turned out. It probably used up its battery life in some sort of contingency mode, continually pinging Pathfinder and wondering why the mama ship wouldn’t answer anymore.
I threw Sojourner in the airlock- it’s less than half the height of a pony and a bit less long than one, so it fits easily. Pathfinder is much larger, and getting it home required some careful consideration.
Starlight brought out her magic battery, which she’s barely touched this whole trip. I knew she was going to try to lift the thing, but I had no clue about the actual mechanics of unicorn telekinesis. I didn’t want to risk her hauling the thing up by the antenna or the imager mast and breaking the most vital bits of the lander off. So I stopped her long enough to explain what we were up against.
Pathfinder and Sojourner together were almost six hundred kilograms of mass at launch. That’s not counting the parachute, heat shield, the landing platform with its retrorockets or winch, or any of the other stuff that got it to the surface. Of all of that, the only things still attached were the balloons that inflated long enough for the lander to bounce and tumble to a stop on the surface. Those balloons stayed attached because there was nothing to cut them off.
Once the lander stopped rolling, it unfolded three triangular petals, all covered with solar cells. That done, it unrolled a little ramp and released Sojourner. And that, aside from its high-gain antenna and stereoscopic imager, was the last time Pathfinder moved… until today.
In an ideal world I’d have carried Pathfinder intact back to the Hab, There are a few devices on the side panels, but they’re totally unimportant to me except for the solar panels. If I could have brought those home, it’s just possible I could use them to at least partially power my new radio.
The problem is, I had a choice: keep the old solar panels, or keep the new ones. There just wasn’t room on top of the rover for both my fourteen Hab panels and a fully intact Pathfinder . And I couldn’t fold Pathfinder up again because its central masts are fully extended, and without power I can’t retract them. If I could close the panels, I’d be risking damage to those masts.
It didn’t take me long to decide that the side panels had to go. So, one careful application of a highly technical mechanical engineering tool (prybar) later, the central panel of Pathfinder had been sundered from the rest. Only then, and only after Starlight assured me she would lift from underneath, did I step back and let Captain Caveyoda take over.
To my surprise, she only lifted it briefly, just enough to move it away from the detached side panels. She set it down resting on a rock cluster (I’ve looked it up: it was Half Dome Rock) so she could point out why she stopped: the ancient tumbler balloons. At the same time wind-blown sand had covered Pathfinder , it had also found tears in the balloons and filled them with dirt.
Starlight wasn’t willing to slice and dice the balloons away in the same manner she’d cut the skin off of her ship with her horn-laser. “I don’t know what I might mess up,” is how she put it. So instead of one quick cut, we worked together, me with a knife and Starlight with very short, careful bursts of light, and in about fifteen minutes we had almost all the balloon material cut away.
Then Starlight lifted the core of Pathfinder up onto the rover roof, onto the back part of the luggage rack where the surface samples bag made a sort of cushion for it. There’s just about enough room left in front of it for the solar cells in the morning.
We weren’t in any hurry to go back into the rover. I mean, we really, really were NOT in ANY hurry to go back. We’ve ended up tangled in one another’s limbs half the nights we’ve been on the road, partly because eleven days on the Martian surface in a billion-dollar buggy really drives home how lonely it is here… but mostly because there’s no place else in our cramped quarters TO be except right on top of each other.
And that’s leaving aside the stench, the muscle cramps, and the absolute and total lack of elbow room in the thing. We wanted an excuse to stay outside, even if it meant using up CO2 filters I could have saved for later.
So we discussed salvaging the side panels for about an hour.
With its masts extended, Pathfinder ’s core is a little too large to fit in the rover airlock. The panels might have been doable, but just barely, and only one at a time. To make it work at all, one of us would have to be inside the rover while the other stayed outside. It would have taken a lot of rotating to find an angle that would let both airlock doors close. But it might have been doable if the need was really urgent.
I decided it wasn’t. Even with all the food we’ve eaten, the rover interior is still pretty damn full. I don’t think we could have stowed two of those panels inside, let alone all three. And once I restore the panels to the Hab’s solar farm, I won’t really be in any need of extra electricity.
So we’re going to leave them here, a last memory of Carl Sagan Memorial Station until the dust covers them up again. Sorry, Carl, but if you were alive I’m sure you’d say that I should do whatever is necessary to survive. Besides, they’ll find something else to name after you.
We’re back inside the hell-hole which is Rover 2’s cabin again. Time to think about the future.
This whole exercise has been about getting a working radio. I won’t know if Pathfinder is even repairable until I get back to the Hab, but there’s nothing obviously broken. I can use air from a pressure tank to blow away dust from components. I have a small supply of lubricant for the rover wheels which ought to help the bearings in the high-gain antenna and imager rotors. And for any electrical mishap short of an actual fried CPU or ROM, I have tools and spare parts. I’m confident that I can fix any purely mechanical or electrical issue.
The thing is, what next? It’s been thirty-five years since anyone’s even attempted to contact Pathfinder. The signal is stronger than anything the Hab can produce anymore, but it’s still weak compared to practically any radio on the ground back on Earth. I can only hope that somebody notices a microwave signal coming from someplace really screwy, gets curious, and tells NASA to get a couple dozen radio telescopes pointed towards it.
But say they do that. What next?
To talk to them I can write things on surface sample label cards. I have a pack of fifty, both sides usable. But how do I receive a message back? Pathfinder doesn’t have any obvious lights or anything, so duplicating the pony telegraph isn’t going to work. That leaves making Pathfinder move something for me to see. There are only three things Pathfinder can control like that: Sojourner, the imager, and the hi-gain antenna.
Pathfinder needs to keep the antenna pointed at Earth or its best guess at the source of its commands, so wiggling that to talk is out. The imager can only rotate on its shaft- full 360 rotation, but on only one axis. I can’t make that work for much more than yes or no.
That’s why, despite space issues, Sojourner is in the cabin with us now, taking up another corner of our constrained universe. If I can get both Pathfinder and Sojourner going, I’ve got as many as six moving parts- Sojourner’s wheels- that could be used. I could work out some kind of semaphore, or maybe write letters and numbers on the wheels and have NASA rotate Sojourner’s wheels to the right characters. It’s still a long way from actual conversation, but it’s better than yes and no only.
I’ve still got a lot to think about, but now isn’t the time. Now it’s time for Agatha Christie. There’s a unicorn here eager to hear more about the homicidal intentions of humans. And tonight one or the other of us will probably sleepwalk looking for a less miserable place to sleep.
But I’ll tell you this right now: if I wake up and find Sojourner cuddled up next to me, I’m throwing that fucking robot back out the airlock. It can hitchhike to Acidalia Planitia if it feels like it.