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THE BARTDON PAPERS - "Cancel all previous directives."


UnusualAttitude

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7 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

Flotilla!  Yay!  in RSS!   Bravo!

Fleets make even more sense in RSS than in the Kerbol system, particularly when using low-ISP hypergolic propellants. If I had sent a mothership, a lander and three rovers in one package it would have been a several-hundred part lag monster with a transfer stage the size of Luxemburg.

7 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

And do I detect foreshadowing about going to Triton?  Let's hope not.  That trip would take forever in RSS :)

Indeed it would with their present technology, and at this point Triton is merely a recently discovered point of light in some Kerbal astronomer's telescope. I haven't even launched a probe beyond Saturn yet. Margaret is just referring to some random far-off body to make her point.

Remember, just because one of my characters talks about some distant destination, it doesn't necessarily mean I intend to go there, or will be able to go there in the immediate future. I fully intend to explore as much of the solar system as is possible with plausible near-future tech, but won't resort to FTL or other such magic.

Also... it's perhaps time to reveal my guilty secret...

Spoiler

This is my first true, unsimulated interplanetary trip playing KSP.

So, don't get too attached to any of the characters, just in case....:D

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2 hours ago, UnusualAttitude said:

Fleets make even more sense in RSS than in the Kerbol system, particularly when using low-ISP hypergolic propellants. If I had sent a mothership, a lander and three rovers in one package it would have been a several-hundred part lag monster with a transfer stage the size of Luxemburg.

Yup.  The whole idea of a mothership IMHO is a habit of thought left over from the Age of Sail.  It doesn't translate well to space.

 

2 hours ago, UnusualAttitude said:

Also... it's perhaps time to reveal my guilty secret...

  Reveal hidden contents

This is my first true, unsimulated interplanetary trip playing KSP.

 

Well, that makes this all even more impressive.  Congrats!

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3 hours ago, MatterBeam said:

I really like the functional-looking spacecraft you're building.

Thanks. I'm still trying to take into account real design considerations (connected crew space, shelter from reactor / solar radiation).

Some things still feel awkward though (that centrifuge on Cernin is tiny, the Coriolis effect would be huge). More landing gear / struts for RSS-sized vehicles would be nice too.

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YEAR 7, DAY 58. CAMWISE.

Dammit, my neck hurts. I would sell one of my grandmothers for a massage right now.

You see, I've spent most of my on-duty time for the past two weeks peering into the small monitor of our remote command station. And I've spent most of my free time during the past two weeks peering over Jonnie's shoulder into the small monitor of our remote command station.

But let's back up fifteen days or so. Type G-Seven was the first to go in. It took several sols for the orbits to align in such a way that we would have a constant uplink from Cernin all the way down to landing. G-Seven's primary mission would be to rove from wherever it landed in the southern hemisphere of Mars (and we held no illusions about our ability to land it anywhere near a pre-selected target) to the southern polar ice cap, inspecting the different geological formations and terrain on the way.

The landing would also have to take place on the day side of the planet. Oh, and Angun was breathing down my neck to make sure that one of the terrain anomalies he planned to visit was between the landing site and the South Pole, which would allow G-Seven to conveniently stumble upon it during its journey.

So all in all, quite a lot of boxes that had to be ticked before we could go down. And if all the conditions were met except for Angun's, well that meant I would just have to fake a failure in our relay equipment or command station in order to scrub the landing and wait for things to line up correctly. As the lottery of orbital mechanics would have it, this happened twice and the second scrubbed descent earned me a message from API Bartdon back at Mission Control screaming “Damn and blast, boy. Get you're EVA suit on and clear that bird's nest out of the antenna. You're embarrassing us!” I whispered an engineer's prayer of gratitude for signal delay.

But even Jonnie was starting to get suspicious about all these sudden, unexplained failures, so the next window would have to be the right one. Before Bartdon had a chance to put his threat of suspending my pay into action, Angun gave me a green light and we were good to go. Now, all that remained was for Jonnie to stick our first landing on the Red Planet, and if anyone could do it, he could.

After the de-orbit burn at apareion, G-Seven came screaming through the thin atmosphere like greased lightning; an atmosphere that alarmingly failed to slow down the rover, still encapsulated in its fairing and attached to its spent transfer stage. Things started going wrong immediately. The airbrakes designed to pull the vessel into an attitude where the lander's retro-thrusters would face the ground utterly failed to do so, and so G-Seven plunged transfer stage first towards the Martian surface.

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When Jonnie finally popped the fairing at fifteen thousand metres from the ground, I breathed a momentary sigh of relief as the ship finally flipped round and pointed the right way. This renewed optimism was short-lived, however, as when Jonnie ditched the transfer stage and activated the drogue chutes, red lights popped up on the console telling us that something else was wrong and chutes weren't gonna happen. Whether their firing mechanism had not appreciated nine months in deep space, or the Martian atmosphere was just too thin for them to actually deploy, I didn't know.

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By this point I had closed my eyes, not wanting to witness the brief close-up view of Mars followed by the static on the screen as G-Seven inevitably slammed into the surface at high speed. When I opened them again, I could not believe what I saw.

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“Uhm... sorry buddy. Couldn't keep her upright. Our little guy looks OK though...” Jonnie shrugged apologetically at no-one in particular.

“How the hell did you pull that off?!” I blurted out.

“Well... your cousin had a hunch that those chutes might not deploy. She told me to pitch up during re-entry to bleed off as much speed as possible before losing the fairing. Something about lifting body effect. We were only doing one-point-two klicks per second when I fired the retros, and we were high enough for them to kill our velocity in time. She knows her stuff, doncha think buddy?”

Thanks for letting me know, cousine.

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G-Seven dropped to the surface and landed gently on its wheels. The images from the rover's hull cam showed the red desert stretching off into the distance, disappointingly bland. Gentle slopes rolled away towards the horizon: ideal rover territory, however. We'd touched down somewhere in a region of Martian highlands called Terra Sirenum, at just over 64° South. The maps established by our orbiters showed that the surrounding area was pockmarked with deep craters, but fortunately we had managed to avoid them and the terrain away to the South was clear. Angun's terrain anomaly was sitting right in the centre of our path towards the polar ice-cap.

I took command of the rover, and with a negligible two hundredths of a second of signal delay, steered G-Seven to face the setting sun. With the correct filter on its camera, the inner planets, including Earth, could be just about made out clustered around our star. Gazing back at our home planet through a camera on the surface of another world was a profound moment, on par with our first steps on the Moon.

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Nearby, the spent lander lay on its side like some kind of dead, amputated spider. I brought the rover closer to inspect the drogue chutes and noticed that they hadn't even fired, despite Jonnie's repeated hammering on the large rectangular button on our console that was supposed to release them. At least now we knew what to expect for our two other landings. I drove away from the lander for a few hundred metres, but the light was fading rapidly and so we decided to halt for the night.

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Over the course of the next few days, our rover headed south towards the smaller of the planet's two ice caps. Froemone had been eager to find out if there was water ice there, as well as frozen carbon dioxide, or anything else that could potentially be made into fuel. He needn't have worried, as G-Seven's sensors detected plenty of H20 locked up in the first few metres of Martian soil, even at this latitude. The atmosphere was full of CO2. Refueling here would be just a matter of having a decent power source, and we should be able to make hydrolox or methalox fuels for a shuttle vehicle to bring us to and from orbit. The far greater challenge would be mastering Mars' slippery atmosphere.

While G-Seven kept on trucking, the stars aligned for G-Eight to come hurtling down for a landing close to the equator. With the experience from his first attempt, Jonnie managed to keep her upright and G-Eight dropped sprightly onto the surface just after local sunset. We shut the rover down and would move it later, as Angun was determined to see G-Seven reach the terrain anomaly before our ship Cernin caught up with Phobos and we put our roving on hold until we had returned from its surface.

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And finally this morning, after two hundred kilometres of driving across endless red sand dunes, an unusual shape appeared above the horizon, clearly visible through the hull-cam. It was pointy. I called Angun and Margaret and requested they come to the command station immediately.

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As G-Seven drew closer, the shape rose over the horizon and became clearly recognisable as a regular pyramid shape in the centre of a wide plain. I had seen the encrypted image emitted by Angun's Monument, but despite being prepared for what I saw, the close-up view of an almost perfectly triangular mountain on the surface of another world was ominously creepy and I squirmed in my seat as I operated the rover's controls.

It was just like the rock arch that Margaret had discovered on the Moon. Maybe, just maybe, it could be explained away by some freaky once-in-an-aeon geological bizarreness, if you put a lot of faith in the unknown effects of volcanism in low gravity. But then again, that was probably wishful thinking, and the truth was likely to be far more sinister.

“Drive round it please, Camwise.” Angun's voice thankfully interrupted my dark thoughts.

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It was difficult to estimate distances through the rover's camera, but I reckoned that the Pyramid was about three hundred metres along each of its four sides, and just over one hundred metres high. I drove G-Seven along the nearest side and turned back southwards. No opening was visible, and the Pyramid's sides blended perfectly into the rest of Mars' surface, covered in the same red dust. No wonder it had been difficult to make a positive identification from orbit.

“OK, Cam. Drive up the side.”

I engaged six-wheel drive and pointed G-Seven straight at the summit of the structure. The increased power demand started draining the little rover's battery faster than its tiny RTG could recharge it but we got halfway up before we had to stop and let the RTG catch up. The Pyramid's sides were very smooth, and we found no openings on the way up.

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“Keep going, Cam. Up to the top.”

G-Seven reached the summit a few minutes later and I applied the parking brake on a small, relatively flat area with a stunning view of the surrounding plain.

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“What now, boss?”

“We keep the antenna extended. Margaret will listen in for any activity. We have a date to keep with Phobos.”

 

Edited by UnusualAttitude
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Good evening,

I hope those of you living on the old continent are enjoying this fine May weather. My marrows are sprouting, and the glow-worms have started to exhibit their bioluminescence throughout my garden. Just posting to say that the Camwise Logs have suffered a slight disturbance caused by a sudden urge to update to OSX El Capitan in order to (eventually) run KSP 1.1. Something funky called System Integrity Protection temporarily disabled my Ubuntu partition, thus denying me access to Camwise's save file, screenshots and text file. Camwise spent several days lurking, abandoned in a dark corner of my hard drive before "csrutil disable" set him free. Those of you who have run Linux on the Mac for 64-bit KSP may understand. Yes, both of you.

Camwise will return this weekend to valiantly conquer Phobos, a place of stunning views and many screenshots. My apologies in advance to your bandwidth.

To thank you for your patience, here is a picture of an A380 with a moustache.

Regards, UA.

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YEAR 7, DAY 63. CAMWISE.

I really ought to have my nose glued to the view-port of our lander right now, considering one of the most beautiful sights of the inner solar system is right out there waiting for me to admire it. But I've got a lot on my mind right now.

Three days ago we arrived at Phobos and made a small capture burn that was little more than a sneeze to bring Cernin into a polar orbit. Or was Phobos in a polar orbit around Cernin? I jest, since even this small moon actually weighs several trillion tonnes, but it's not often you get to joke about a body that has less than a milli-gee of gravity.

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We've been preparing Céré for its descent to the surface of Phobos for the past couple of days. Jonnie and I have spent hours running our little ship through its extensive check-list. I must admit that from a technical point of view I'm now feeling much better about this whole landing-on-Phobos thing than when I first clapped eyes on Céré during ground testing back at Omelek. She is a much lighter vessel than the one that got us down to Luna but couldn't get us back up, and will probably handle the low gravity just fine. There's just one small detail though... she's absolutely tiny.

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Céré is so small that we will have to take turns in the passenger module to get some sleep standing upright and strapped to the capsule's walls during the brief rest period scheduled halfway through the mission. I was informed by some scientist back at Mission Control that the gravity will be so low that I won't notice the difference from zero-gee. It's funny how these people are so sure of themselves, as if they've been out here themselves already to try it when they assert this sort of thing oh-so confidently.

Not that anyone will feel like sleeping. We'll be hopping across the surface several times if all goes well, spending most of our time on EVA plundering samples and data from as many places as possible in a frenetic forty-eight hour scientific binge. We intend to try and determine the true nature of Mars' moons and where they came from, a matter that is that is, as of yet, unclear.

You see, for a long time it had been thought that Phobos was a captured asteroid. But despite the fact that from a distance it looks quite like a bog-standard main-belt body that was captured into orbit around the Red Planet at some point, there are a couple of problems. Firstly, gravitational data from our Escamps probe had shown us that the interior of Phobos was highly porous. The moon was perhaps even a rubble pile, with significant voids that may or may not be filled with ice. Secondly, Phobos, like Mars' second moon Deimos, orbited its parent body in a rather neat, circular orbit.

When presented with the problem a couple of years ago, Steledith had scoffed at the idea of a rubble pile being captured into a perfectly circular orbit by atmospheric drag without completely breaking up. When pressed to offer a hypothesis of her own, she had simply told us in one of her characteristically vague strokes of genius “Well, it's obviously left over from an impactor that grazed the parent body and blasted material into orbit where it later accreted. All you have to do to be sure is find out if it's made from the same stuff or not. A bit like what we did with Luna. Do want me to see if I have a sample? Which planet were you talking about, again..?” before wandering off to stare into the sky at something only she could see.

As well as finding out where Phobos had come from, Froemone had rather predictably requested we look for the water, if it was there hiding between the gaps in the rubble pile. He reckoned our best chance of finding it was drilling a deep hole at one of the moon's poles. I remember staring at my colleague intently as he explained to me that his best estimate for the average depth of ice at high latitude was twenty metres.

“So you want us to dig a deep well into the regolith of Phobos..?” I'd wanted to know.

“Uhm... yes.”

“...wearing spacesuits and working in half a milli-gee...?”

“Well, uhm...yes.”

“...to a depth of twenty metres?”

“Yes.”

Well, thanks for your input, Froe. We'll get back to you on that one.

And if ploughing through this laundry list of scientific duties wasn't enough, I'll be rubbing shoulders inside this cramped tin-can with a hotshot test pilot and an influential scientist with a hidden agenda for two action-packed days. Can't wait.

Now, speaking of hidden agendas, Margaret has started acting a little strangely as we prepare to leave her as our caretaker on board Cernin. Our lander barely has room for only three, so she will miss out on this first trip, although we will refuel Céré and make a second visit to Phobos if all goes as planned, or more data is required. Besides, someone has to stay and make sure that the moon's puny gravity doesn't lose hold of our mothership. How ironic it would be if we returned triumphantly from our first interplanetary landing, only to find our ride home drifting slowly off into the distance.

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Margaret had come to join me during one of my evening shifts on the bridge. She'd floated in and strapped herself into Jonnie's seat next to me, and had stared out of the side window at Phobos rotating through its seven-hour orbit without saying a word. While we had been busy with preparing our descent to the moon's surface, Margaret had been spending a lot of time at our remote command station, watching the footage coming in live from the Pyramid on Mars.

When the silence became uncomfortable, I asked with genuine concern, “Are you going to be OK up here on your own?”

Without tearing her gaze away from Phobos she replied “I'll be fine. I need some time to think.”

With sudden resolve, I decided that I'd had quite enough of hidden agendas, and I turned to face Margaret. “What do you need to think about? I know you two are still listening in on the transmissions from the Monument. What are you arguing about, and why aren't you telling us?”

This didn't seem to surprise her. There was a long pause, and then finally she said “The Monument transmitted an image of a ship.”

“A ship? Like the one on the Moon?”

“No, something much larger. A mothership. It was in orbit around Mars. And then the same ship in orbit around the Earth. And then, on Earth, everything died.”

While I tried to process this revelation, the only thing to say I could think of was “But we didn't die. We survived. In fact, that was when we started to thrive.”

“Nearly everything else on Earth died. And I wouldn't exactly call our present state of affairs thriving. Until a few decades ago we all lived in caves. Most of our kind still do.”

“So, whatever brought us to Earth was making damn sure we'd have little competition,” I suggested, with blunt engineering logic.

“Or, whatever brought us to Earth accidentally picked up something on the way that almost wiped our new planet clean. And we were the lucky survivors,” she retorted.

There was another long silence.

“Camwise, the Earth was once a paradise,” she said at last. “Forests teeming with mammals, rodents and birds. Flowered plains throbbing with insects. Tall grasses swaying in the breeze. Thick, humid jungles alive with creatures you've probably never even dreamed of. I've seen all this in the Earth's rocks and sediments, believe me.”

She finally turned to face me. “I hope you like eating fish, deep in the safety of your caves, Cam,” she said with bitterness in her voice, “Because if Angun takes this thing from Mars back to Earth with us, you might have to get used to it.”

I was about to remind her that we weren't going anywhere near Mars on this particular journey, and that we had sent rovers down there instead, thus avoiding any risk of back contamination, when she was cut off by Angun entering the bridge. From the look on his face, Angun was certainly in no mood to discuss the details of interplanetary contamination.

“Camwise, your watch is over. Margaret will take over from you. Go and rest, we will take Céré down to Phobos in six hours.”

“Uh.... OK, boss.” I said. I glanced at Margaret as I left to make my way back to the centrifuge, but she was staring out of the view-port once more.

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Now, we have just released Céré's empty transfer stage and are drifting gently down towards the surface at just a few metres per second, for our first landing in the bottom of Stickney crater, which is perhaps the only place on Phobos that we can expect to be anywhere near flat. Just letting our lander fall to the target will take a couple of hours. Through the window by my folding seat I watch as Mars appears to set behind the walls of the massive crater, our lander now hidden from the planet's baleful red glare. I can't help thinking about what Steledith had suggested to explain the moon's origin. What if Phobos was just a bit of Mars ripped out and hurled into space?

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Something suddenly feels really wrong about this whole going-to-Mars idea. It might be time for me to start making lists of options for when things go south.

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Edited by UnusualAttitude
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12 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

Cam is right, that is a great view :)  Looks way better in RSS than in Orbiter.

...And if I can get RVE and/or Scatterer working in 1.1. we'll have to come back just for the screenshots...:)

12 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

Interesting story of Kerbal origins.  Did they replace humans?

Whoa, slow down: for the moment, all this rambling between Angun, Margaret and others may be just conjecture. They might be missing something important, or just be plain wrong. Who knows? (Well, besides the author).:D

What we know for sure so far:

-There is a ship that appears to be of alien origin on the Moon. It has apparently been there for a very long time.

-There is something that looks like a black slab of stone or glass (that Angun calls the Monument) on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean that emits encrypted pictures.  

-These pictures include (but may not be limited to) the Martian Pyramid, and pictures of a large vessel orbiting Mars and Earth.

-Eight hundred thousand years ago there was a major extinction event on Earth. Its cause is yet unknown, but it was unlike previous events (not vulcanism or asteroid impact).

-In the fossil record, the Kerbals pop up some time shortly after this event.

That's it. We still don't know if Margaret has told Camwise everything she knows, but she's obviously very worried about something: possibly back contamination by a pathogen from Mars that killed off the plants and animals of Earth. But that's OK, they're going to Phobos, not Mars. Everything will be fine.

With regards to humans: one could certainly imagine that this is in the future and they existed on Earth prior to the Kerbals, but they will not appear in this story, nor do the Kerbals have any knowledge of them.

TLDR: this story will be a puzzle with the various pieces scattered around the Solar System. Let's just hope that the last piece is not on Adrastea or Sedna. Keep on reading. :wink:

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21 hours ago, UnusualAttitude said:

With regards to humans: one could certainly imagine that this is in the future and they existed on Earth prior to the Kerbals, but they will not appear in this story, nor do the Kerbals have any knowledge of them.

Ah, OK.  It just seemed to me that it might have been possible :)

 

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6 hours ago, superstrijder15 said:

Or on like some oort cloud object!

Although admittedly, that would allow me to produce a nearly endless amount of Camwise Logs. Just imagine...

Spoiler

 

YEAR 265, DAY 321. CAMWISE.

Today, whilst suiting up to perform an EVA to inspect our now 103-year old ship for micrometeorite damage, my long, grey beard got caught in the locking mechanism of my helmet. It took an embarrasing two hours and much cursing for Catbeth to hack it free with scissors. My humiliation was completed by the fact that the forward crew quarters of Cernin XIII are now full of tufts of my hair floating in zero-gee and clogging up the air filtering ducts.

Jonnie got caught off balance during the 23rd course correction of our mission to object OC-112-23b. His tumble caused his dentures to fly clean out of his mouth. He still cannot find them and I've a horrible feeling that they may just have ended up in the waste recycling system that is connected to our greenhouses...

 

Not sure I want to take things that far, though...:D

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YEAR 7, DAY 65. CAMWISE.

It's hard to stay awake as I write this log. I've managed to catch just a few short hours sleep in the last two days, and my body aches from lugging bits of Phobos back into our capsule to take home, as well as running experiments on the surface. I'm also completely filthy, with the dark dust of an alien world smeared generously across my face, my skin, and filling my hair, ears and nose, and possibly other parts of my anatomy I don't really want to talk about. This damned stuff gets everywhere. And now, just when we thought we would be able to relax as Céré coasts back up to meet Cernin, we find ourselves unexpectedly chasing some unidentified object that appears to be orbiting the Martian moon.

Now, I'm sure you're already dying to hear about this new turn of events, but let me first tell you about our stay on Phobos.

Céré drifted down through the silent vacuum and settled on the bottom of Stickney crater with a dreamlike languidness that felt almost unreal. It was if the tiny capsule was trying to creep quietly up on the moon and nestle on its surface without being noticed. A quick puff of our thrusters was all it took to bring us to a halt with the landing gear's foot pads just inches off the surface. Gravity seemed to ignore us completely for a moment, until Céré finally floated onto the dusty terrain. Jonnie fired off both of the harpoons and they sank deeply into the ash-grey regolith. All movement stopped. We were down.

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An old bad habit of mine is holding my breath during the last few metres before touchdown. In this case, this had meant depriving my lungs from oxygen for nearly a minute. I didn't realize that it was over and that I could breathe again until Angun started staring at me, and I inhaled with a gasp. Angun actually grinned, which is something that I hadn't ever really see him do before.

“Congratulations SE. We made it. Helmets on, my friends. Get the camera rolling please.”

Angun despised pomp and ceremony with a passion, and I must say I shared his feelings on this matter, but he knew how valuable the symbolic image of our landing here would be to keeping the money for our venture rolling in. So, as Jonnie checked that Céré was still in good health and we prepared to depressurise our capsule for what would be the first time of many during our stay, I fired up our camera and grabbed the tripod, ready to capture our first steps on a distant world.

Our Principal Investigator was the first to squeeze through the little hatch and grab onto the ladder, and then I pushed my upper body out to film him from above as he pulled himself down, rung by rung, until he was almost touching the surface. He looked back up at me and into the lens of the camera, although his face was barely visible through his faceplate. As I peered through the viewfinder, I couldn't help but notice that there was a thin coat of dust already settling all over our ship, our suits, and everything else in the vicinity. We had encountered such dust-clouds after lunar landings, but here they apparently took much longer to dissipate in the negligible gravity.

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Angun dropped off the lander onto the surface, turned, and took a first tentative step. Despite his best effort to make it a small one, he managed to float several metres into the air and landed some distance from our ship. He engaged his KMU, and succeeded in controlling his drift across the surface. So much for the first step on Phobos, we would have to use our jet packs if we wanted to get anywhere.

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I followed him down onto the surface to set up the tripod, with Jonnie just behind me. Together we stood in front of the flag that Angun had planted, trying to look like brave, solemn space explorers whilst our head scientist gave a short speech about how important it was to all our kind for us to reach out and explore new horizons. I wasn't really listening, as I was glancing over at the hilarious sight of Jonnie trying to appear solemn. Remind me to put in a request for a totally opaque faceplate for our next crewed mission.

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After a mercifully short monologue, Angun was done and turned to us.

“Kill the camera. Let's get to work.”

Angun began his sample collection, I busied myself with setting up the surface penetrating radar we had brought with us to take up Froemone's quest for finding water ice without resorting to digging deep wells into the surface. We immediately realised that it would have been impossible to dig, drill or otherwise burrow into Phobos' surface anyway. Trying to work manually in such low gravity would have been a non starter; those of you who have ever tried to tighten a nut, hammer a sample from a rock or push anything in space will surely agree. The Third Law of Motion, always glancing over the shoulder of any Kerbonaut with its unblinking, merciless gaze, will just shrug and say “nope.”

To make matters worse, the top layer of fine, powdery regolith on the moon's surface was estimated to be several - perhaps many - metres thick. It would take some pretty heavy-duty equipment to get through that, and parking something like our Padirac rover down here wasn't going to happen anytime soon. Angun was having trouble finding anything to put his hammer to in the first place. There were quite a few small pebbles and small rocks scattered around, but he had to float some distance away to find anything bigger.

Our first three-hour EVA was over in a flash and we boarded Céré to stow our samples and equipment, and beam up the first results to Cernin. Margaret would then send the data on to Earth using our mothership's powerful hi-gain dish, allowing us a better bandwidth than if we'd used Céré's own folding long-range antenna. And if we didn't make it back for some reason, at least part of our data would.

As soon as the capsule was pressurised again, Jonnie powered up the tiny thrusters and took us up on a short hop to a site to the North-East of Stickney, about half way to Drunlo crater. I tried to relax and settle back to gaze through my view-port, sneezing out regolith for most of the short journey. This damned dust was so irritating. The next stop, Angun assured me, would be a short one. We would stay put, while he visited a specific boulder that had been spotted from orbit. All he needed to do was to chip off a sample, and we would be on our way again.

“What's so special about this rock?” I wondered.

Angun was smiling again, but enigmatically this time. “Maybe nothing,” he replied.

The consistent inability of Phobos to drag us back down to its surface without taking ages to do so played havoc with our schedule, and landing took longer than expected. Jonnie actually had to thrust towards the ground a little to bring us down where we wanted before the terminator plunged our target into darkness. With the cabin depressurised and my helmet on once more, I watched from the capsule as Angun made his way back down the ladder once again, and started floating down a steep slope into the darkness.

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There is no twilight on an airless world, and as a consequence, he was in pitch black shadow once he'd gone just a few metres from Céré. His suit light flicked on and cut a swathe through the inky vacuum, allowing me to follow his progress until he disappeared over a small ridge. Damn you, Angun, I muttered to myself. His radio link cut off immediately, and there was no way for us to reach him or for him to talk back to us. Going against the most basic of our EVA regulations, Angun had crept away into the darkness on a solo jaunt. Don't make me come looking for you. Perhaps I shouldn't anyway... Maybe she is right.

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Minutes passed as if they were hours and even Jonnie who was sitting a few feet below me in his tiny cockpit began to get jumpy. Through my headset I could hear him drumming his gloved fingers against the instrument panel and muttering c'mon buddy in a low voice to no-one in particular. I waited, peering out through the capsule's hatch into the gloom for any sign of our scientist, with Margaret's words ringing in my head. I hope you like eating fish, deep in the safety of your caves, Cam...

My thoughts were interrupted by a beam of light reappearing from behind the ridge and moments later, Angun climbing up the ladder with a particularly bulky sample bag attached to his belt. As soon as he was inside and the hatch closed he requested Jonnie to take off and head for the next site. Meanwhile, he was already stowing his newly obtained samples in the locker under his own seat. But not before I caught a glimpse of the contents through the transparent heavy-duty plastic.

The exposed part of the rock was almost black and space-weathered, just like everything on the surface of Phobos. But the fresh surface beneath, where Angun's hammer had broken a sizeable chunk away from the boulder, was as red as rust.

“Is that what I think it is?” I asked.

“Well, let's put it this way,” said Angun with his characteristic evasiveness, “Steledith's hypothesis on the origin of Martian moons may just have gained significant weight within the scientific community.”

Our next stop was on the edge of one of the many deep grooves that criss-crossed the terrain of Phobos, cutting indifferently through ridges, mounds and craters. The one we planned to examine was near the moon's south pole and was about a hundred metres across for a depth of thirty metres. It was just one in a group of similar features that stretched for several kilometres along the surface and, when viewed from a distance, suggested that a team of space-faring giants had once stopped off here to perfect their bowling skills, leaving perfectly parallel gashes cutting deep into the regolith.

To our Investigation Team's disappointment, none of the giant boulders they might have used to make these grooves could be spotted, which discredited the space-faring giant theory, but Froemone suggested we might find ice (if it was there, indeed) closer to the surface if we scanned the bottom of one of the grooves situated at a relatively high latitude where the sun's rays were less harsh. After taking turns to rest in the cramped space of the ridiculously small crew quarters, we ploughed through the dust for another four hours with the ground penetrating radar and gathered more samples. This would be our last halt on the sub-Mars hemisphere, so I boarded the capsule last and paused to gaze up at the Red Planet looming ominously above the horizon.

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We Kerbals are not often bothered about confined spaces, most of us having grown up many fathoms beneath the surface of our planet, but I was starting to feel uneasy after 24 hours in this tiny tin can. But there was one last place for us to go to.

The Escamps probe, our first envoy to Phobos, had stopped talking back to us just a few hours after landing. This had been more than three years ago, and we wanted to try and find her. I had requested this short extension to our mission, as I was interested in witnessing the effects of nearly four years in deep space on one of our craft with my own eyes. Or maybe I was just sentimental, and felt guilty for strapping something I had designed onto a pile of explosives the size of a tall building, and blasting it into deep space, never to return.

You know, these probes we build do all the really crazy, dangerous things that we would never consider attempting with a crewed mission, and we gave them no choice in the matter. For once, I had a chance to pay my respects to one of our true gonzo explorers.

Jonnie fired our thrusters once more and took us back round the anti-Mars side, back to the ridge named Kepler Dorsum where Escamps had come to rest. Although it had been impossible to spot our probe from Cernin's high orbit, Jonnie identified it easily from more than a thousand metres away, the foil-wrapped fuel tank of the probe standing out brightly against Phobos' dark background. We drifted down to the surface one last time.

Ic3Ufe1.png

“As quick as you like, SE,” said Angun, who was obviously not convinced by the scientific value of this final stop. But seeing the venomous look I shot at him as I put on my helmet, he did not insist. Céré's cabin was depressurised once more.

Escamps remained upright and intact, but her deployable long-range dish had folded shut, which suggested some sort of power failure. I floated over to inspect our old probe more closely and noticed a very fine layer of dust covering the hull, fuel tank and solar panels. In a futile gesture, I brushed some of the fine powder from the solar arrays and the avionics bay, but Escamps was long dead.

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I pulled my power tool from my belt, selected the right socket, and bracing myself on the fuel tank, unscrewed the green navigation light we superstitiously fitted to all our probes to guide them through the eternal nights of the great black desert. I whispered “Goodnight, Escamps. Well done.” And, taking the light with me, made my way to our lander without looking back, and came there never again as a living Kerbal.

When Céré took to space once more to rendez-vous with Cernin, I reclined in my jump-seat and gazed out of the window, watching Mars rise above the horizon. I rubbed a grubby sleeve across my filthy face, blackened by dust from Phobos, some of which probably came from the Red Planet. I was too tired to care. Saying goodbye to my space probe had been such a profound moment. We would catch up with them, eventually. All of them. It might take a few lifetimes, but we could follow them out there into the void. I felt elated.

Then my gaze caught something.

Just above the limb of Mars, a glint of sunlight reflecting off... something.

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I squinted for a moment, trying to estimate its size and distance, which was always a difficult thing to do in space. But after a few moments, I realised that I could see it moving against the background of stars. It was definitely not that far away, and it was not Cernin, as our mothership should be in a totally different area of the sky. Maybe it was Deimos? Maybe Phobos had got to my head and I was now officially, completely crazy?

“Angun?”

“Yes?”

“You might want to come and see this.”

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Angun floated over and peered out of my view-port. It took him several minutes to make out what I was pointing at, but he spotted it eventually. By this time, it had drifted in front of the red disk of Mars, which meant that it certainly wasn't Deimos. Angun and I looked at each other for a long moment, until finally he spoke.

“Jonnie. I have a new target for you.”

 

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2 hours ago, UnusualAttitude said:

YEAR 7, DAY 65. CAMWISE.

It's hard to stay awake as I write this log. I've managed to catch just a few short hours sleep in the last two days, and my body aches from lugging bits of Phobos back into our capsule to take home, as well as running experiments on the surface. I'm also completely filthy, with the dark dust of an alien world smeared generously across my face, my skin, and filling my hair, ears and nose, and possibly other parts of my anatomy I don't really want to talk about. This damned stuff gets everywhere. And now, just when we thought we would be able to relax as Céré coasts back up to meet Cernin, we find ourselves unexpectedly chasing some unidentified object that appears to be orbiting the Martian moon.

Camwise, in a galaxy far, far way, a long time before or after you were born, take your pick, this band called Little Feat wrote a song about you called "Willin'"

I've been warped by the rain, driven by the snow,
I'm drunk an' dirty an;, don't ya know, I'm still
Willin
'

 

2 hours ago, UnusualAttitude said:

And, taking the light with me, made my way to our lander without looking back, and came there never again as a living Kerbal.

 
"Now cracks a noble heart.—Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!—"
                                     -Hamlet, Act V,, Scene 2
 
 
 
 
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16 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

Camwise, in a galaxy far, far way, a long time before or after you were born, take your pick, this band called Little Feat wrote a song about you called "Willin'"

Aww, Mister Geschosskopf. Now I'm seein' my pretty Lisabeth in every headlight. I will however be sure to add this to Cernin's bridge playlist for the long trip back through the night to Earth. It will make such a nice, mellow change from that dreadful racket Jonnie listens to all the time.

16 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

"Now cracks a noble heart.—Good night, sweet prince,

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!—"
                                     -Hamlet, Act V,, Scene 2

Funny you should think of that. The next log will be the finale of Part Two and the next couple of lines:

What is it ye would see?
If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search.

will be most appropriate...:D

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Also, I did a bit of research into the Martian moons while writing these past few logs (@NathanKell & Co: I love how RSS inspires me to learn more about the places I'm going to / landing on, thanks for such an awesome set of mods..!) and I must admit that I was fascinated by what we know / don't know yet / don't have a clue about. Phobos is literally a riddle wrapped in a mystery.

The following video is a great lecture about the state of our knowledge of Phobos and Deimos, and is fairly recent (2014). SETI have some great lectures, by the way...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S7M-Wt61Hk

And also, welcome new readers. Glad to have you on board!

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6 hours ago, UnusualAttitude said:

Aww, Mister Geschosskopf. Now I'm seein' my pretty Lisabeth in every headlight. I will however be sure to add this to Cernin's bridge playlist for the long trip back through the night to Earth. It will make such a nice, mellow change from that dreadful racket Jonnie listens to all the time

I take it, then, that you agree that song is about Camwise? :)

 

6 hours ago, UnusualAttitude said:

Funny you should think of that. The next log will be the finale of Part Two and the next couple of lines:

What is it ye would see?
If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search.

will be most appropriate...:D

Yeah, that mysterious dot seen out the window can't be anything except wonder and/or woe incarnate...

 

4 hours ago, UnusualAttitude said:

Also, I did a bit of research into the Martian moons while writing these past few logs (@NathanKell & Co: I love how RSS inspires me to learn more about the places I'm going to / landing on, thanks for such an awesome set of mods..!) and I must admit that I was fascinated by what we know / don't know yet / don't have a clue about. Phobos is literally a riddle wrapped in a mystery.

I wish I had the bandwidth to stream a nearly 2-hour video and also the nearly 2 hours of free time needed to watch it.  For folks like me who'd love to watch it but can't, can you give a brief synopsis of the salient facts?

The one thing I've heard that seems fairly certain is that one of Mars' moons (Phobos I think) is in a doomed, decaying orbit.  In at some point millions of years down the road, it's expected to be ripped apart by tidal forces and then ultimately its fragments will form a line of fresh craters marking its former orbital plane.  I hope the Singularity happens in my lifetime so I'll be able to watch that :)

 

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10 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

I take it, then, that you agree that song is about Camwise? :)

On the level of Camwise having the resolve to carry on and get his job done and get his crew home (being "willin'") despite being knocked around, half-starved, lied to by his superiors and crewmates whilst experiencing some of the most extreme conditions a Kerbal has ever had to face, yeah sure, that's him.

Not sure that Camwise has ever been to Mexico, though. And I'm pretty sure that he hasn't smuggled cheap tobacco or immigrants across the border. Unless you consider that this is a metaphor for what the crew of Cernin may or may not be bringing back from Mars/Phobos with them...

10 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

For folks like me who'd love to watch it but can't, can you give a brief synopsis of the salient facts?

Living in a land of free health care, relatively cheap internet with high bandwidth and numerous public holidays to enjoy it with, I am happy to oblige...:D

Speaker: Pascal Lee, Deputy Principal investigator of the proposed Phobos And Deimos & Mars Environment orbiter mission.

DISCOVERY

-The existence of the moons of Mars was "predicted" before they were discovered. Earth has one Moon, Jupiter has four (large Galilean) moons, so astronomers believed it was logical that Mars should have 2. (See Gulliver's Travels, or Voltaire's Micromégas...:D)

-Deimos, then Phobos were discovered in 1877 by Asaph Hall working at the Naval Observatory in Washington DC. They were difficult to observe (particularly Phobos) due to their proximity to Mars and the glare from their parent body.

-Phobos orbits Mars in 7h39min (well below stationary orbit), Deimos in 30h (well above). Both orbits are equatorial (unlike in KSP RSS) and nearly circular. This means that Phobos is in a decaying orbit.

-In 1945, Bevan Sharpless calculated the orbital decay rate of Phobos at 5cm/year, based on a number of observations. This would put impact with Mars in 100 million years. A Ukranian astronomer Iosef Shklovsky (mistakenly discounting tidal friction) suggested that the only possible explanation for Phobos' decay was atmospheric drag and therefore the moon must be very light and hollow. "We are led to the possibility that Phobos (and possibly Deimos) may be artificial."

-Given the present orbit of Phobos, it can't have been there for more than 500 - 1,000 million years (much shorter than the age of the solar system).

EXPLORATION

-There has been no successful mission dedicated to the Martian moons, although many of the probes sent to Mars have made opportunistic observations of Phobos and Deimos. These observations allowed the main surface features to be mapped: in particular Stickney crater and the grooves on Phobos. The origin of the grooves is still debated. They may be deep (fracturing due to tidal forces), as Phobos is already within its Roche limit. They may be superficial and have been caused by impacts.

-The Soviet probes Phobos 1/2 and Phobos Grunt were all failures, although Phobos 2 did make it close to Phobos and return pictures before contact was lost.

-The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has sent very good images of the moons.

ORIGIN

Phobos and Deimos could be 1) Captured Asteroids 2) Remnants of Mars' formation 3) Re-accreted impact ejecta (like our Moon). Are Phobos and Deimos even related?

Very low bulk densities. Phobos: 1.88 Deimos 1.47

Very porous (up to 55% for Deimos). These voids may or may not be full of water ice.

Phobos and Deimos look very different and have different cohesion (Phobos is still intact despite being inside Roche limit, it has craters, grooves, etc... Deimos has a much smoother surface, no craters or grooves, could be a rubble pile). Could water be a cement for these moons?

They are very dark (low Albedo). Colour ratio images show that Phobos is made up of two units, a redder one and a bluer one. Deimos is all red. The spectrum of Deimos is similar to a D-Type asteroid. (These asteroids are found in the outer part of the main belt, and contain a lot of water). Phobos' redder unit has a D-Type spectrum as well, and is similar to Deimos.

Is the bluer unit of Phobos the true native material, and red material is being transported from Deimos to cover part of Phobos' surface, via dust transfer? A case of "Spectral Tampering".

The blue unit on Phobos is limited to the rim of Stickney crater, where the red unit has been blasted away.

This spectral data only pertains to the top few microns of the regolith. We need more information about the composition of the moons.

So... what are they?

-Captured Type-D asteroids? (PROS: D-Type spectra, low density. CONS: We can't explain the capture process. The blue unit of Phobos is not D-Type)

-Remnants of Mars' formation? (PROS: Circular Orbits, Low density, CONS: Phobos should no longer be there, decaying orbit).

-Reaccreted impact ejecta? (PROS: no water in spectra, Phobos blue unit. CONS: Decaying orbit. When did this happen?)

None of these hypothesis should be favoured or discounted with our present knowledge.

The bottom line is that there are plenty of things to discover by going to Mars, even if we don't land there. If the moons are captured type-Ds, this gives us easy access to an outer solar system body. If they are remnants of Mars' formation then there are things yet to be learned about the process of planetary formation. If they are reaccreted Mars ejecta, then this will give us easy access to Mars samples, and tell us more about impacts forming moons.

There, not sure if that was a "brief" synopsis, but I find it enthralling...:D

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11 hours ago, UnusualAttitude said:

There, not sure if that was a "brief" synopsis, but I find it enthralling...:D

Thanks very much!  That was very interesting.

I had never given much thought to those moons, what with all the headlines being about stuff succeeding or failing at Mars :)  Thus, I had always assumed from this that there must not be any major questions about the moons.  Of course, I guess maybe finding microbes on Mars was higher priority than a couple small rocks even if they were enigmatic.

These days, however, the recent flood of data about exoplanets hasn't yet, AFAIK turned up a solar system that looks at all like our own.  Instead, our arrangement of planets seems to be a very rare statistical out-lier.  Nearly all alien systems seem to have either a "hot Jupiter" and nothing else, or 1 or several "super-Earths".  This showed the scientists they didn't know nearly as much about how solar systems form as they thought they did, so they got to playing with simulations.  Now they think they can explain why the norm for the universe is the way it is, but can't yet see how we went off on such a different path.  Thus, the question of the origins of Phobos and Deimos is part of a bigger picture which, with folks now seriously talking about going to other stars, is assuming greater importance.  So maybe we'll send a probe to one or both in the next decade or 3.  I hope so, anyway.

( As an aside, the fact that alien terrestrial planets all seem to be huge, high-gravity things, the idea of the classic waif-like "grey" alien seems even more silly.  Morel likely, the aliens would be rather large, massive, squatty things that would probably regard Earth and humans as being at the same toy-sized scale as humans regard the KSP universe and Kerbals :) )

 

 

 

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12 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

Of course, I guess maybe finding microbes on Mars was higher priority than a couple small rocks even if they were enigmatic.

Yes, which is probably as it should be, since finding life (or even traces of extinct life) beyond Earth would be one of the single most important scientific discoveries in history. But even defining the experiments to do so has proven to be difficult...

12 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

These days, however, the recent flood of data about exoplanets hasn't yet, AFAIK turned up a solar system that looks at all like our own.  Instead, our arrangement of planets seems to be a very rare statistical out-lier.  Nearly all alien systems seem to have either a "hot Jupiter" and nothing else, or 1 or several "super-Earths".  This showed the scientists they didn't know nearly as much about how solar systems form as they thought they did, so they got to playing with simulations.  Now they think they can explain why the norm for the universe is the way it is, but can't yet see how we went off on such a different path.  Thus, the question of the origins of Phobos and Deimos is part of a bigger picture which, with folks now seriously talking about going to other stars, is assuming greater importance.  So maybe we'll send a probe to one or both in the next decade or 3.  I hope so, anyway.

Exoplanets are so fashionable these days... :D We have to remember that our present means of detecting them (the vast majority have been found by the Kepler telescope using the transit method) gives us a pretty skewed view of these star systems. Kepler requires three transits to confirm the existence of a planet, so for a planet with an orbit like Saturn's, that would take 90 years of observation at least.

We may be just a few years away from being able to see the signatures of life (if they are present) in the atmospheres of some of these planets, so these are exciting times indeed. Knowing that life is common throughout the universe, or that it is rare and we're pretty much alone out here, either way, might just push us to get our game together and start acting like responsible galactic citizens. :wink: But I hope that this doesn't distract us from exploring our own solar system for answers. There's so much to be done on our own cosmic doorstep.

12 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

( As an aside, the fact that alien terrestrial planets all seem to be huge, high-gravity things, the idea of the classic waif-like "grey" alien seems even more silly.  Morel likely, the aliens would be rather large, massive, squatty things that would probably regard Earth and humans as being at the same toy-sized scale as humans regard the KSP universe and Kerbals :) )
 

...or maybe they might be fish, dolphins, or Kraken? There's plenty of scope for marine life, even on a large, high-gee body. Just sayin'...

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YEAR 7, DAY 65. CAMWISE.

The thing about judging distances in space when you don't know what you are looking is that... well, you can't. The tiny speck of light we were straining to see could have been a small insect stuck to the outside of my window, or it could have been the VAB fifty kilometres away. Not that either of these two examples I chose at random were likely, given that we were still orbiting a Martian moon nearly one hundred million kilometres from Earth. But was the thing we were looking at orbiting Phobos itself? We couldn't even be certain of that. It could just as well have been a ten kilometre long alien mothership in low Martian orbit.

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Despite not having a clue about its range, Jonnie flipped us round and burned straight for it, regardless. What followed was half an hour of some of the most awkward space maneuvering I have ever witnessed. It was a shoddy bit of improvisation that, had the circumstances been different, would have had me cringing in shame and feeling like a disgrace to my space programme. Flip around, burn towards the target, flip back to see the target through our view-ports, try and estimate range and rate of closure, flip around again, repeat...

Margaret chimed in, wondering why we had changed our trajectory and were no longer heading back towards Cernin. Over the radio, her voice sounded nervous, edgy. I initially took this to be a reaction to the unexpected turn in events, but our explanation of the situation didn't seem to appease her. Angun was about to sign out when she said, “Wait Angun, there's more.”

“What is it?” he asked, his face unreadable.

“The new spectrometry data I've been working on while you were down there. It presents clear markers of phyllosilicates in the regolith of the north-eastern rim of Stickney,” she replied, as if she was giving us some really bad news.

“That doesn't surprise me at all.”

“Angun, you know what this means. You went out there to get those samples. You're suit is probably covered in that dust right now. It's probably all over the capsule...”

Oh dear, that sounded like something I should probably start worrying about I thought, looking at Angun's face covered in smears of Phobos' sooty black regolith. I looked down to my own hands. Grey dust, everywhere. For the first time, Angun's face seemed to convey a hint of annoyance, or was it something else..?

“This doesn't change a thing, Margaret. The chances of anything surviving such an impact are nil. The chances of anything surviving for millions of years on the surface of Phobos are also nil. Now please, get back to your work. As you might have noticed, we are busy,” snapped Angun before he cut the connection.

I stared at him for a long moment. The sort of stare that demanded an answer. But Angun was the sort of person who could endure being stared at in such a manner indefinitely.

“What was that about?” I was forced to ask eventually.

“More points for Steledith's hypothesis. Margaret is worried about back contamination. I am not.” You could almost hear the full stop at the end of his sentence.

Against all odds, I was about to attempt to press the matter but we were interrupted by Jonnie who had bad news of his own. He'd used just about all the fuel we could afford if we wanted to rendez-vous with the object and still make it back to Cernin afterwards. Hopping around Phobos had used just under half of our delta-v, which was impressive in itself since we'd landed on the moon in four different locations. But flailing around blindly on a wild goose chase after an elusive target was proving to be expensive.

“Alright, CTP. Cut the engines. We wait and see how close we can get. Bring it round into view.”

Céré rotated once more and brought our target back into my view-port. Our relative movement had brought it out of Mars' disk, which told us that it wasn't that far away. It was indeed orbiting Phobos, and it was probably several metres across. We would make our closest approach to it in just a few minutes.

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Angun and I floated next to each other, our heads almost touching as we peered through the laminated glass. I'd killed the lights in the cabin to eliminate reflection and to give us the best possible view of whatever we were about to see. It was probably no more than a kilometre away now and I started to make out shapes and even colours. I had certainly never seen anything like it before, at least not in space. It was round and lumpy, like certain asteroids. But asteroids don't have... protuberances like this object did. And they most definitely aren't green.

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Just as we were getting close enough to make out details, Jonnie flipped the capsule yet again to kill off our velocity relative to it, and it went out of our field of view for a moment. Céré's small thrusters hummed again, just a few metres per second, and then cut off. The only sound in our now darkened capsule was the drone of the life support system. The sputter of the RCS jerking our ship back round made me jump.

However, the thing that drifted into view as Céré rotated once more was a true vision of horror, and I couldn't even move or speak as I tried to convince myself that my eyes were deceiving me. This cannot be... but Angun was also speechless, and even Jonnie had nothing to say. If it was a hallucination, it was a collective one.

The object, or creature floating in space, less than a hundred metres from Céré, was shaped like some kind of cephalopod, but it was larger than any I had ever seen or even imagined. Its body was several metres across and enveloped in some kind of dark, green skin or shell. The six stubby tentacles that protruded from one end were of a lighter green, pale and ghastly. And the eyes. Dull, and orange, they stared sightlessly into the void.

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Frozen rigid, transfixed by the cold vacuum of space, this eldritch life form had been left out here to circle the Red Planet endlessly. I began to wonder if I would ever get a good night's sleep again.

Angun's voice cutting into the silence almost made me scream. But it was low and hesitant. Angun never talked like that.

“SE... the camera.”

With a huge effort, I pulled my body out of its stupor and grabbed the camera from its storage locker. We were still moving slowly in relation to the creature and it was about to drift past beneath us. Jonnie kept rotating the capsule so that we could track it, but it was getting harder to make out against the dark backdrop of the night side of Phobos. I struggled to catch it in the viewfinder. Then, after passing just a few metres from Céré, it began to drift away into the glare of the distant sun. After a futile attempt to shoot some footage that almost left me blind, I gave up.

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“Open the dish, SE. I want a direct link to mission control.”

“O...K...” I finally managed to stammer.

As it happened, we opened our hi-gain antenna just in time to intercept an incoming message from Earth. This was unusual, as Earth would usually talk to Céré via Cernin's dish, the signal relayed by our short range omni-directional antenna. My concerns were confirmed as I read off the text, beamed from Omelek about ten minutes earlier.

Céré, please respond. Cernin has apparently experienced a communications failure. Margaret is not responding. Do you have a short range link?

I looked up at Angun as I finished reading. This time I was certain. There was fear in his eyes.

“Call Margaret. Now.”

I fumbled with the radio and attempted to raise Margaret. There was no response.

“Jonnie, burn for Cernin. Get us there fast,” Angun barked.

“OK, buddy.”

Céré turned and her engines hummed once more, pushing us back towards our ship, leaving in our wake the greatest mystery in the history of science. Since Jonnie had realigned our ship once more, I couldn't even watch as the strange creature faded out of view behind us. The final proof of alien life in the universe, returning to oblivion once more less than five minutes after it was discovered in the face of some new crisis.

mKDxSrl.png

Cernin was clearly visible ahead however, having risen above the horizon of Phobos just a few minutes previously. Getting there fast with our present fuel budget meant a thirty metres per second burn that would allow us to rendez-vous in twenty minutes. Twenty endless minutes that Angun spent near the view-port, glaring angrily out towards mothership, as if his eyes were tractor-beams that could reach out and pull it towards us.

I spent those awful twenty minutes trying to imagine what had gone wrong on Cernin or, to be more precise, trying to think what Angun imagined had gone wrong. What were our options if something had happened to the only ship within 100 million kilometres that was remotely capable of taking us home to Earth? We had, like, four days of life support at most on Céré. Perhaps a week if there were volunteers amongst us to take a permanent walk in space... Come on, Cam. You're freaking out. It's just a blown fuse in the antenna array. Margaret is fine. Options, Camwise.

I almost burst out laughing when we drew close enough to see Cernin clearly. She was clearly intact, solar panels still deployed, and with no visible signs of damage of any kind. Her high-gain antenna was folded away though, and we still couldn't get a reply from Margaret. A blown fuse it was, then. Jonnie's final burn brought us almost to a halt, but alarms blared before he had even completed it, telling us that the last of our fuel was about to trickle out of our thrusters into the void. We were now coasting very gently towards Cernin's midships.

I26MfYK.png

“Almost dry, buddies. I might need Margaret to turn Cernin towards us so we can align and dock.”

The radio crackled and the sudden intrusion of Margaret's voice blaring through the capsule made us all jump. For a fraction of a second, relief at the sound of her voice. Then a kick in the stomach hearing what she had to say.

“I'm sorry, Jonnie. I can't do that. I can't let you back on board Cernin. If I do that, none of us are going back to Earth.”

There was a moment of stunned silence. This can't be happening.

“Angun, are you listening?” she asked. We could actually see her through the windshield of Cernin's bridge.

Angun looked up towards her, fury in his gaze. “What would you have me say, Margaret?” he called out. “I find the idea of something living on the surface of an airless moon for thousands of millenia preposterous, and the chances of it being harmful to present-day life on Earth more than remote. You won't convince me with threats.” On any other day, Angun's scornful tone would have carried absolute conviction. But today it did not. How could it, having seen what we had just seen?

The tone of Margaret's voice did not change at all, she was serious about this. “This is not a threat, this is a decision and I'm not going back on it. You have hidden the truth from your crewmates long enough. I tried to warn them, but it seems that I am still outnumbered.”

Céré was still drifting closer to Cernin but would eventually pass her by above the lab module and drift off into the dark void. She is going to leave us out here in deep space. Options, Camwise.

0FaXis1.png

“So,” said Angun in a horribly matter-of-fact tone, “You are going to kill all three of us.”

“No, you did that by going down there, Angun. Jonnie, Camwise. I am so sorry, you probably still don't understand why I'm doing this...”

...if one of us could maybe get over to Cernin... but there's not enough time... find something Cam, if you don't want your potted plant to wither away for good... Options...

“...and I suggest that you get Angun to explain it all to you before you, you... I am so sorry.”

M8qi67k.png

...find something, if you want to see the sun rise over the ocean once more and feel the warmth of the breeze as it comes in across the beach... if you ever want to see Lisabeth again...

A moment passed and then Cernin's main engine ignited. Margaret was indeed leaving us behind.

...find something, Camwise.

Edited by UnusualAttitude
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7 hours ago, UnusualAttitude said:

One of Jonnie's tunes? :)  Like it.  Seems a bit shamanic in the video, too.

 

Quote

Frozen rigid, transfixed by the cold vacuum of space, this eldritch life form had been left out here to circle the Red Planet endlessly. I began to wonder if I would ever get a good night's sleep again.

Wow, that was unexpected.  Poor Kraken.  Requiescat in pace.

 

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...find something, Camwise.

Ah yes, the devices always pregnant with much suffering :wink:

BTW,  what's so bad about about phyllosilicates (which I had to google) ?  I ate my supper this evening off a plate made of them, as have most post-Neolithic humans for the past 7000 years or so, and the world hasn't ended yet.  So am I misunderstanding the meaning or has Margaret just gone nuts?

Edited by Geschosskopf
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