Landing Small by Terry Wilson (librera reader txt) 📕

Landing Small

Note: Cover image provided by NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems (Image R21-00326) in accordance with their Image Use Policy.

21 September 2016

The recorder sees data, sees the views of cameras. Hundreds of measurements. If it had a soul it could easily imagine what it looks like from outside the Stampede Lander it is riding on. With some imagination, it could visualize the mist of the refrigerant being let out of the craft's radiators. But in reality, it can only record the event. It can see the red planet Mars, increasingly flat horizon looming ahead. Valle Marineris, the solar system's biggest sinkhole, silently drifts by underneath. Over the horizon ahead is its destination, the rugged plains of Meridiani.

Feeling the traces of the atmosphere, the edges of the heatshield start to glow with the distinctive pink light of ionized oxygen and hydrogen in the high reaches of the Martian atmosphere. The guidance system calculates the current trajectory limits for Normal Load, Thermal Rate, Thermal Load, Uprange, Downrange, Track Left and Track Right, all of which the recorder sees; all of which can later be reconstructed into an ever-shrinking oval projected around the target point on the surface of Mars, representing where the lander could theoretically survive going. It feels several thermometers heat up. Its cameras are filled with orange flames. G-forces build, and it feels through several other sensors the small jolts from the thrusters and the heat of their firings. Does it enjoy the experience of descending through Mars' thin atmosphere? I'll ask it if I ever find the poor thing.

The guidance system knows that the lander is going long. It tells the recorder that it's worried. It's going to try popping the parachute early. The recorder feels the jolt as the thirty metre parachute inflates above, then as suddenly that force goes away. The recorder sees the parachute explode above, suspension lines dangling in the supersonic breeze with pieces of the shattered blue-and-white bowl still attached. The guidance system can't give up, keeps energizing the circuit to deploy the parachute over and over in the vain hope that it hasn't really deployed and shredded already. It keeps calculating and recalculating the rocket powered portion of the descent, just in case the parachute suddenly starts working again. The recorder sees the contact speeds increase from their gentle normal values rapidly into the range nothing could hope to survive. The emotionless guidance system refuses to give up, still planning what it would do if the parachute suddenly worked. The recorder hasn't been taught what normal looks like, so it only knows that the guidance system considers the situation hopeless, even as it-

The Destiny Booster watched it go in, the plume of wreckage scattering about above the horizon.

Thomas Shinra pounds the driver's console of the Lowell Rover, "Crap!"

Lucy, on his right, turns to him in alarm, her piercing blue eyes burn the side of his head. The mission commander is reluctant to turn his face to her. Instead closes his eyes and sighs, "It's gone. Trailer Two is gone. All we know is that the chute deployed twelve seconds ahead of schedule, and..." his voice trails off into a sad sigh.

"Damn," Lucy sighs quietly.

Ronny pops his crew cut blonde head through the hatch in the rover's roof, the rest of his athletic physique is in the inflatable space habitat. Thomas knew he was on his way already because the subtle wobble he felt in his seat from Ronald Harvey's workout on the "rope climber" had gone away.

"We lost Trailer Two," Thomas explains.

"Well that sucks," the upside down geologist replies.

In the hab, floating in front of the window in her grey tank top, curly black hair around her head, the brown-eyed, ebony-skinned Beatrice Laurence looks down at her digital camera with its long, fat lens, zooming on the picture she just took of the Martian surface. She can see a grey patch on the surface where the plume was. Still no sign of the parachute, the only part of the lander big enough for the camera to have any hope of making out.

Ronny rushes to her side, "Do you see anything?"

"I'd say about a forty metre splat mark. I hope you're about to tell me that's the dust kicked up by the descent rockets," the twenty-seven year old biologist says, handing him the camera.

The boyish twenty-nine year old huffs, "She's a goner, I'd say. Thomas lost the signal a few seconds after the parachute deployed early. The last ground speed sample we got was eighteen seconds after the chute deployed."

The black lady takes the laptop computer and looks at the lander's telemetry display, finding the value with her finger, "Two hundred eighty nine metres per second." Handing it back she says, "No wonder I couldn't see the chute." Apparently, the lander and its six tonne payload were still supersonic when they encountered the surface of the planet.

Beatrice takes her camera back and floats towards the rover. Thomas, forty-seven with his grey fringed black hair and fickle peppered mustache. His eyes wide and attentive, he asks, "Please tell me you saw the chute."

She hands him the camera. The darkened pixel that could be the Destiny booster sits at the edge of the frame. In the middle is a patch of dark, speckled grey. Thomas realizes he's probably looking at a debris field.

Lucy Graheme, her long blonde hair imprisoned in a bun at the back of her head, the small sticks protruding from it look almost like TV antennae, floats into the hab. She looks older than thirty-one; please don't tell her that. "We'll be hearing from Malton in about fifteen minutes. DSN will have the Dopplers for us." With a small smile, she adds, "I needed to go on a diet, anyway."

Ronny already has the trailer's manifest called up on the laptop, "I'll let the calorie-budgeteers do the gruntwork, but it looks like our major discomfort is going to be the loss of the second quad. How are we going to check out Greenhorn Plateau without it?"

"Put a few more miles on Lowell, I guess," Lucy suggests, referring to the big pressurized rover they plan to land in tomorrow.

Thomas smiles, "From a scientific perspective, how important is Greenhorn Plateau."

Ronny runs his hand over his short blonde hair, looking like his world is crashing down around him. "I ... I don't know. What we do know is that it's the floor of a crater the wind has blown away the sides of. Underneath it, the strata we could find might be boring, or-" he pauses, looking over to the picture of it taped to the taut wall of the inflatable habitat.

"There could be dinosaur bones for all we know," Beatrice whispers, preparing her soul for the inevitable announcement from Thomas that they won't be able to visit the site.

"Could it be worth retargeting our landing over?" Thomas asks quietly.

Lucy's head spins at him.

"We could bring Lowell down between Greenhorn and Destiny tomorrow, within walkback distance. Remote drive the quad from Trailer One. That would take about a day and a half. We got thirty-six on board," Thomas' eyes roll up at the ceiling as he does the math in his head. "Six for deploy, four for wrapping up, four for driving back gives us the site for nineteen, maybe twenty days?"

Ronny's eyes light up, "You wanna do that?"

Lucy's got a trajectory up on her laptop.

"We can't do it, can we?" Beatrice groans, "Some maneuver thing."

Lucy says, "We'd need to do a plane change, maneuver point's in three hours."

"We could put off our landing for a day and still have the site for eighteen," Thomas says hopefully.

"Deorbit's in four hours, and deorbit prep takes one," Lucy says, looking up from her laptop.

"So either way, we have just two and a half hours to convince Malton to change a landing site we've been planning to go to for two and a half years," Thomas explains.

Lucy nods and hums.

Mission commander Thomas "Major Tom" Shinra, survivor of the Sprint crew ferry's maiden voyage that could have been written for the 1983 Peter Schilling song Coming Home, seditiously curls up the left corner of his lip as his eyes return to the geologist, "You wanna do this?"

Ronny smiles. He officially takes charge seven days after they land, being the chief geologist and outdoorsman. Did he just make a rocket science decision deferred to him by the mission's chief rocket scientist?

"Tom, the site could be just plain enormous," Beatrice emphasizes, "We have to-" Beatrice stops, now that Thomas has his eyes on her.

"Don't convince me, Convince Malton," Thomas says. Malton, Ontario is the home of the mission's control centre. "Type fast," he says as he stretches his fingers, "These things take eight chapter proposals."

Lucy races to her favorite spot in the rover to draw up her trajectory chapter. Thomas is beside her, budgeting the propellants in their almost empty maneuver stage, "We can combine the maneuver," he says, "get us our day back."

Lucy pauses, refining the combined deorbit-plane change solution on her computer, then says, "An hour for deorbit prep. The only way we can make that is if Malton makes the decision in like, an hour."

"Well, then," he opens a new window, "I'll see if I can get Graham and Battler to start up the landing site revolution back home."

Lucy ignores the message alarm, <Sorry about Trailer Two.> But the second alarm stops her cold.

"Holy crap!" she barks, "You're not gonna believe this, Tom."

"What?" he turns, "Trailer Two survived?"

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URGENT: Greenhorn Indispensable; Deorbit Maneuver Altered

Equinox,

The trajectory guys told us this morning that Trailer Two was coming in just a tad under the corridor. They didn't think we were going to actually lose it, but one of them did a couple fast runs and figured there was a small, but significant chance that the guidance system would overcorrect, overshoot, pop the chute early and crash and we just _knew_ the FSL bastards would do exactly that to us if this were a sim.

Now, we won't _make_ you guys do it if you're uncomfortable changing the landing site you've trained for all this time, but we do think you should _really_ consider putting Lowell down between Greenhorn and Destiny. (Personal from Bill: Battler is _still_ on my case!!) Depending on how much charcoal you can save from the hab, We'd say you got 15, 20 days tops to actually work the site (counting the wraps, driveback, fetching the ATV from Trailer One, which will take you probably 12-14 days.) Please get back to us right away.

Your friends in Malton
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Three hours later, the maneuver stage fires for the last time. The Hab floats away, and the maneuver stage, along with its "stovetop" service module and "wok" sunshields. Thomas, the greatest docking pilot within a hundred million kilometres, carefully backs Lowell's Stampede Lander out of