The Kodak Missions, part 2: Landing on Jool's Moons

[Wayfare]

The Kodak Missions 2: Moon Landings

The first part of the Kodak Missions can be found here.

Throughout the process of landing the Laythe Rovers, the Kerbal Alarm Clock had been keeping diligent track of Pathfinder 1's probes. They had detached from the central structure and were cruising towards their respective maneuver nodes. With utterly ridonkulous amounts of delta-v in each probe Mission Control felt confident they would at least be able to establish an orbit around each of Jool's remaining four moons.

The Tylo Probe was the first to perform a capture burn. The Pol and Bop probes used the Tylo encounter to have their orbits slingshot up higher, while the Vall probe had burned for a Vall intercept which avoided Tylo entirely. In this shot the Tylo probe passes over the “mold line†geological feature while Jool and Laythe are visible.

The Bop probe cruises to its capture burn. Laythe peeks out just below Bop and Tylo can be seen a bit further on the other side of Jool. All probes achieved stable, circular, equatorial orbits with no incident. This meant every body in the Jool system now had an artificial satellite (including the Pathfinder 1 structure which was left in a highly elliptical Jool orbit and will probably smash into a moon at some point). Champagne time at Mission Control!

Separation of the Pol Lander from its orbital probe parent. The Pol Rover is slung underneath.

The Pol Lander comes screaming past Mount Humongous as Jool hangs majestically overhead.

Touchdown! More champagne is poured at Mission Control as the Pol Lander successfully sets down on a treacherous incline. The Pol Rover is deployed and circles around to inspect the lander. It's jittery but it doesn't seem to want to explode, so that's good.

Next up, the Vall Lander coasts away from its parent probe.

Another round of champagne as a Kerbal device first touches the surface of Vall. The landing site offered a very pretty view of Jool looming just over a nearby hill. The rover will go looking for further photogenic sites.

Rinse, repeat, drink up – the Bop lander touches down beautifully.

The Bop rover moves off in search of the mythical Space Kraken. Mission Control found the rover to be extremely hard to control in Bop's low gravity. Probe torque turned out to be much more effective than wheel steering in adjusting the rover's orientation. One controller described it as trying to drive a floor waxer on an ice rink. He added that seeing double didn't help either.

Emboldened by the success of the landings on Pol, Vall and Bop (and a few more glasses of champagne), Mission Control greenlights the most uncertain part of the Pathfinder mission: landing on Tylo.

The remaining bottles of champagne are uncorked as the Tylo Lander runs out of fuel well short of any kind of safe landing speed. Drunken mission controllers quickly re-christen it the Tylo Impact Testing System with no regard to the Kerbal Family Association's puritan standards.

“Vaporized†best sums up the outcome of the TITS experiment. At least we got a decent snapshot out of it. Plans for manned Tylo landings are shelved somewhere between the empty champagne bottles.

While Mission Control sleeps it off, a mockup of the next mission's star player sits in testing mode on the launch pad...