Landing Small by Terry Wilson (librera reader txt) 📕

the "birdcage".

"Get some sleep, fellas," Thomas orders, "Tomorrow's a busy day. In twelve hours, we're going to be on the surface of Mars."

As if.

The next morning, strapped into their seats, the four wait for entry interface, having done all their checklists, memorized every known glitch. They all know that in twelve minutes, there's a twelve percent chance they'll all be dead. When it comes to Mars, "hell" is spelled with three letters:

EDL.

Entry lasts about eight minutes and they will experience about four or five times the force of Earth's gravity as they skim through the outer edge of Mars' atmosphere. Lucy will watch the guidance system, taking the controls if need be. Descent lasts about two minutes starting with the deployment of the parachute. At this point, Thomas takes over. Landing starts with the ignition of the rockets and will take no longer than fifty-two seconds. Fifty-two seconds? That's when Stampede runs out of fuel and dies. Thomas hopes to have it over in thirty.

Fire surrounds the lander and starts to thin away. The force on the astronauts tapers off from its maximum of 4.6g. This doesn't stop the illusion that each second that ticks by gets longer and longer. To Lucy, the surface of Mars is starting to feel like the event horizon of a black hole, and that for her, time will come to a perfect standstill before she can open the parachutes.

The guidance system wants to level off the ship's roll early, exactly the same thing that killed Trailer Two. Lucy lifts her heavy, suited arm and sets her gloved hand on the stick, tilting it right. There was supposed to be an alarm, but the only thing Lucy can hear is the pounding of her heart every few seconds. She can feel the breath flow past her lips, but she can't hear her own voice as she bellows, "I have control." Her blue eyes scan the screen showing the craft's speed and altitude. She glances left to see Thomas view what each of the three guidance computers thinks. She doesn't need to worry about that. Just concentrate on flying the ship.

The Stampede Lander weighs only twelve tonnes, a heck of a lot less then the eighty tonnes experts thought would bring mankind to Mars only ten years ago. Twelve tonnes is a special number. Every lander that has ever successfully landed on Mars (and two that haven't: 1999's Mars Polar Lander and yesterday's Trailer Two) used parachutes and aeroshells based on the four billion today dollar legacy of the Viking landers of 1975. There has been quite a bit of variety in how to get from the parachute, which will slow you down to a minimum of about 90m/s, or three times the highway speed limit, to a safe touchdown. Twelve tonnes is the absolute limit of this system. To add the thirteenth tonne to a successful Mars lander would cost more than the entire eleven-point-five billion dollars invested to get Equinox this far.

The crew carrying Lowell rover is the eighth Stampede lander, following six successes and one failure. Lucy carefully guides the lander by hand, letting the left edge of the oval on her display get a little closer to "Site 347" between the Greenhorn Plateau and the Destiny booster than the guidance system would have. Then she cranks the stick the other way, rolling the candy shaped aeroshell to turn left instead of right.

Thomas realized that she wanted to save herself from doing the last roll reversal. She succeeded. Slightly low on energy, Thomas reaches with his glove and the stylus protruding from his knuckle and pulls the terminal stop maneuver's termination point a thousand metres west on his touchscreen.

Lucy pops the parachute.

"I have control," Thomas growls from behind his helmet's closed visor. He waits a two count past the guidance recommended point to disreef the parachute, and then mashes the switch with his gloved finger. The jolt pulls the arm back into its rest on the seat. Six seconds later, he throws the switch to release the heatshield, a bump everybody can feel. The heatshield has a big foot stool in the middle, on which the rover's belly was resting, helping to bear its weight during the launch from Earth and the entry they just completed. The downward looking cameras can see, and a few seconds elapse before the wind predictor program analyzes the video and calculates the true motion of the lander relative to the ground.

Thomas is relieved to see that its calculated wind is close to that in the forecast. With another switch thrown, the backshell splits in two and slides off the sides of a skeleton frame surrounding the hover crane propulsion stage. It surrounds the short tunnel between the rover's hatch and the docking port that had joined it to the inflatable hab the day before. Now the whole thing disengages from the Lowell Rover, which drops about twice its own length on six stout cables.

<Now, we wait,> Thomas thinks. Two minutes to descend. The wind is in his favor, so he moves the terminal stop point a few hundred metres closer to Site 347.

The no-burn impact timer counts down to just nine seconds. Nine seconds is the life expectancy of Thomas, Lucy, Ronny and Beatrice if the hover crane landing stage decides to go on strike.

It shows up for work: the self-igniting combination of UDMH and MON3 (Thomas remembers, but Lucy would have to look them up) pour into the twelve motors. The "gravity" pulls the six wheels down from where they were tucked up beside the rover's boxy body to their splayed operational pattern, each on its own bogie. The craft violently tilts almost thirty degrees to the east, then still at full throttle, pulls the other way. Eight of the twelve motors shut down as the craft slows to a hover, threatening to catapult right back into the sky had it not done so.

Thomas has the stick in his hands, Rover Lowell flying one hundred metres over the surface of Mars at racetrack speeds. The forward speed gauge on Thomas' screen reads 60m/s, or 216km/h. Try taking a six tonne vehicle off road at a hundred thirty-four miles an hour!

Lucy closes her eyes. Not so much because she's scared, not so much because she thinks she's about to die, not so much because she's never gone this fast and this low in the simulator. Not so much because she doesn't trust herself. She closes her eye because she trusts Thomas.

<I have 36 seconds,> he realizes, <35>. The projected perspective on his screen, which draws the terrain using a four year old picture from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows a computer generated model of the Lowell Rover and what little is left of the Stampede Lander, flying swiftly from the midair "TS" to "Site 347" Glancing back and forth from the live cameras in the nose of the rover to the computer generated view. <Those five rocks are on my left,> he realizes. Thomas Shinra, not the computers, knows exactly where they are.

He pulls the stick right, rotating it in his hand, taking the six tonne rover around the fastest corner it will ever turn, he finds the bright sandy depression called Site 347. A little, not a lot of dust is kicked up by the rockets, and he realizes that Lowell will not sink, so he does not have to risk drifting past into the angry looking cobbles just beyond. The wheels of Lowell settle onto the sand of Mars, and slide to a halt after about one metre. Twelve seconds to spare. The hover crane, free and clear, relieved of its six tonne payload, catapults into the salmon sky above.

Lucy feels the rover rocking on its six bogies, then stillness and silence. She opens her eyes.

Behind them, Beatrice and Ronny clasp hands. Lucy smiles. Thomas, his raging heart finally slowing down, opens his visor and mops the sweat from his brow. Then he reaches for his mike switch. In about eight minutes, Earth will know that mankind has finally reached the nearest planet with the following words:

"Malton, Equinox, no reply necessary. Rover Lowell is on the ground at Site Three Four Seven. Preliminary is no injuries, no damage, landing error zero. Over." Imprint

Publication Date: 11-07-2009

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