10
Boat Rock
Will normally remembered very few of his dreams, but Saturday night he seemed to be dreaming constantly and vividly. A range of images flashed through his mind: of Aurorae Chaos dotted with green domes and covered habitats like a giant Martian suburb; of a climb up the rock faces to the top of Boat Rock; of a hike on Phobos and asteroids. Then the venue shifted to Earth. He saw his ex-wife, whom he still loved or at least admired greatly; then he saw his mother and sister eating their breakfast before dawn preparing for a day of fasting ahead of them. . .
And he woke up. He sat up in bed and at first he was unsure where he was. The bedroom was still filled with boxes and he had not installed a little nightlight that illuminated it. Nevertheless, some light filtered in through his porthole-sized window. He stood up and looked out. It was dark; the sky was peppered with stars. His west-facing window revealed the shadows of Boat Rock to the left against the starry canopy. And balanced on the western horizon was Phobos, rising into the sky and almost full.
He was startled to see it at first and thought perhaps it was setting; then he remembered that it rose in the west. The fullness of its disk told him something about the sun as well; it was close to the eastern horizon. He looked at his clock; 5:30 a.m., about half an hour before sunrise.
If he got up then, he could eat breakfast before sunrise as well. So he turned on the light, pulled on his clothes, and headed for the kitchenette.
Will managed to drink tea, eat two slices of toast with jam—he had made bread the day before—and have a small portion of scrambled eggs (a combination of fresh and powdered) before the sun suddenly popped above the horizon, almost unheralded by twilight. He cleaned his dishes and set up the coffee maker so that the others would have their morning coffee. He was walking back to his room when Ethel appeared.
“You’re up early!” she exclaimed. “Sorry I didn’t have anything ready for you; breakfast is my responsibility today.”
“I set up the coffee,” replied Will. “I woke up really early and decided to start my day early.” He paused, then decided to say a bit more. “I had a dream last night; my mother and sister were eating breakfast before dawn. So I decided that I could fast today, since we have no official work to do.”
“Fast? No eating?”
“And drinking. It’s really not as hard as it sounds; your body adjusts. All I’m doing today is setting up my room, then going for a walk.”
“Geology?”
“No. Well, not primarily. Let’s call it a ‘poetic expedition.’ I need to walk around and get a feel for this place.”
“Oh, I’ll come. That would be interesting.”
“Okay.”
Just then David’s door opened. “Good sol,” Will said to him.
“What?”
“‘Good sol.’ I figure if they say ‘Goo’day’ in Australia, we can say ‘Good Sol’ here.”
“True. Good sol to you, too. Did I hear you talking about a hike?”
“I’m sorry if my voice disturbed you. I want to go on a ‘poetic exploration’ of the area. Geology is secondary.”
“Good idea. Can I come?”
“Sure.” Will looked at Ethel. “That makes us a threesome.”
“Great,” said Ethel, and she really did seem happy with the arrangement.
Sergei’s door opened and out stepped Laura in her bathrobe, heading for the bathroom. Where they were standing, they could see down both hallways easily. “Good sol,” Will said.
“What? I’ve never liked that word, ‘sol.’ I’d rather think of today as Sunday than Sunsol. In fact, Sunsol is repetitious, isn’t it?” and she headed to the bathroom.
“Yes, I suppose it’s repetitious; but pretty soon Sunsol will fall on terrestrial Monday,” replied Will.
Laura shrugged and disappeared into the bathroom.
Ethel looked at Will, who looked back at her. David saw the exchange of glances. “There’s not much we can do.”
“We know; we tried,” replied Will.
------------------------------------
The next sol—Monsol—Sergei and Laura rose early to prepare automated cargo lander 3 for a short ballistic hop. Stripped of their cargo, the landers had a mass of about a tonne, including tanks able to hold 2.5 tonnes of liquid oxygen and methane. The engine only had to work once—to slow the lander on its descent to the Martian surface from Earth—but they were mass produced and designed for multiple use. Last week lander 3 and its two drills had been checked out; it had enough fuel to make a short hop from its touch-down site to the place where they had decided to drill for water.
The flight lasted only twenty seconds. The lander took off on a preprogrammed trajectory that accelerated it to seventy meters per second at a 45 degree angle relative to the surface. It rose six hundred meters into the sky, then descended to the ground, steering based on three beacons they had deployed. Its engine came on again for the last seven seconds, burning off the velocity, touching it down gently about two meters north of where they had intended it to be. Half an hour later, after the engine had cooled, Ethel and Will approached it, unrolling an electrical cable as they went; they plugged it into the lander, connecting it to the electrical grid. Then they checked out both drills and deployed them. Within an hour both began to drill into the Martian subsurface, six meters apart. Each drill bit was self-propelling, gripping the walls and pulling itself downward as it drilled. The cuttings accumulated in a ten-meter long plastic sleeve that, once full, had to be lifted out and replaced; Will would take each sleeve and study it with great interest, as it preserved the subsurface layering. A tube carried Martian air down the hole to the drill bit to cool it. Aurorae’s relatively soft sedimentary rock could be penetrated at the rate of about ten to fifteen meters per day. Each drill could go down 100 meters; at that point the cable and tubing from one could be transferred to the other, doubling its length and allowing it to drill to 200 meters. When another lander arrived with another pair of drills, they’d have 400 meters of drilling cable and tubing they could deploy. In spite of advances in automation, drills needed a certain amount of maintenance, as similar equipment on Phobos had demonstrated.
Once the drills were operating, they expanded the outpost’s solar power system. Aurorae already had seventy-five kilowatts of solar power capacity in the form of arrays unrolled across the desert next to three automated cargo landers, two shuttles, and the habitat; each had a pair of high efficiency (32%) solar panels. The panels sat on the ground, exposed to the sun, with no concentration of solar rays on the cells and no ability to track the sun, with the result that at sunrise and sunset power output was miniscule and peak power output lasted only about six hours a day. Furthermore, no heat energy was captured, only electricity.
The solar power unit they were deploying changed the situation considerably. Ethel and Will struggled to pull it from its box and place it on the ground in a spot that Laura had already smoothed using the ranger’s bulldozer blade. The unit had handles and had a mass of almost 300 kilograms, though its weight on Mars was the same as an adult male. They put it on the ground and oriented it carefully, then attached an air hose that ran to a tank of liquid carbon dioxide. They cracked the valve and allowed gas to begin flowing into the cylindrical balloon.
Almost immediately the unit began to respond by inflating and unfolding. The rising gas pressure literally unrolled the structure. While Ethel held onto the end where the gas was entering, Will held the unrolling structure and guided it. The structure consisted of a line of solar panels, each a meter square, so every flop of the structure as it unrolled brought a panel one meter downward to the ground; the fall had to be cushioned to make sure no damage was done. They opened the valve only a crack at first so that the gas entered slowly.
Soon the line of solar panels that had unrolled was thirty-two meters long, its maximum length. They opened the valve all the way and the unit began to inflate more rapidly, forming a cylinder thirty-two meters long and thirty in diameter, though it was still pancake flat because of the very low internal pressure. The bottom half of the cylinder was a silvered reflecting surface containing a strip of solar panels running down the middle a meter wide. The top half had another one-meter wide strip of solar panels with a one meter of silvered surface on each side of it. The cylinder was aligned north-south so it could be rolled to the east or west. At dawn its silvered hemisphere would be on the western side, reflecting the rays against the line of panels and the secondary reflecting surface on the eastern side; the latter reflected some sunlight onto the strip of panels in the middle of the western side. As the sun rose in the sky the cylinder would roll until the silvered hemisphere was on the bottom at noon, reflecting the sun’s rays straight upward at the panels on top; at sunset the cylinder would have rolled so that the silvered surface was on the east side, facing the setting sun. In this simple manner the cylinder could track the sun as it moved across the equatorial sky and always focus nine hundred sixty square meters of sunlight onto the panels.
They did not inflate the structure into a full cylinder immediately; they stopped when it was a partially inflated pancake and the silvered mirror was still not in the right shape to concentrate the sunlight on the panels. At that point they plugged the unit into the grid so that its power could be fed into the system, and so that the power output could be measured. The needles jumped upward right away; even in its semi-inflated condition it produced four kilowatts of power.
It took longer to attach the heat exchanger tubes to the panels. Because the panels received concentrated sunlight from the silvered surfaces—fifteen times Mars normal and six times Earth normal, about the intensity of sunlight on the surface of Mercury—the panels got quite hot. Hence their backs were covered by a network of plastic tubes through which compressed Martian air was circulated to cool them and extract the heat. Will and Ethel also had to thread a cable through a series of loops at each end of the structure. Anchored on the east and west, pulled by a motor, the cables would roll the structure gently across the smoothed desert floor to track the sun.
All those tasks done, Ethel opened the valve again and allowed more carbon dioxide gas to flow into the cylinder to inflate it fully. While it inflated she and Will pulled back a thin plastic sheet wrapped around the cylinder and drove stakes into the regolith to anchor it down. The sheet served as an underskirt to protect the inflated solar concentrating cylinder from any irregularities in the ground underneath.
It took another hour for the cylinder to inflate fully. While it filled, they drove metal anchors for the cable mountings deep into the ground—they used a sledge hammer to get them in—then attached the cable pulleys and motors. Both cables had a pulley and motor at each end and thus they had to install four of them, then run an electric line from each under the edge of the underskirt to the line that went to the electric grid. Each pulley and motor took at least an hour to set up, so when the solar concentrator was fully inflated they had finished just one. They paused to admire the huge object, which now stood thirty meters high and wide and thirty-two meters long.
“Just think, if we filled this thing with hydrogen and removed the bulky heating tubes, it would take off,” said Ethel. “That’s a future experiment; a solar powered dirigible.”
“It’s hard to believe, but this thing’s huge and light weight. Didn’t the balloon people develop it originally?”
She nodded. “Yes, they were familiar with the materials. I just hope we won’t be patching holes in this thing very often. We could spend half our time here keeping it inflated.”
“Pinprick sized holes could be handled by a compressor pretty well.” Will looked at the top, with the strip of panels and a strip of silver along each side. “What I don’t understand is why they made two strips of solar panels instead of one. It would have been a simpler, cleaner design.”
“But a top heavy one. The balloon structure itself weighs close to nothing; all the mass is in the solar panels and the heat exchangers attached to their bottoms. The two strips are opposite each other and have the same mass, so they balance each other.”
“Oh, of course! You can see why I’m not an engineer. How could this thing be used as a dirigible and a solar concentrator at once? The gondola has to hang from the bottom.”
“This design wouldn’t track the sun; the panels would just soak up whatever sunlight fell on them directly, which is an average of three kilowatts and a peak power of ten kilowatts at noontime. That’s enough to turn a propeller and store power for nighttime use. Eventually the Mars project will receive a spherical balloon, though, with silvered concentrators, and the basket will ride a cable across the surface of the sphere in order to keep the silvered areas pointed at the sun. I think Columbus 3 will experiment with it.”
“Solar powered aircraft strike me as safer.”
“Well, yes, and the technology is now well developed on Earth for high altitude cell towers and such. We’ll see how it works here.”
“Let’s roll the cylinder toward the sun so the systems can be tested,” suggested Will.
Ethel nodded. They each headed toward the eastern end of a cable. The sun was approaching the zenith, but had not reached it quite yet. By pulling very gently, the entire huge structure rolled slightly eastward until sunlight fell on the silvered surface and was reflected onto the panels. They were both monitoring the output data and saw the sudden power surge.
“Wow!” said Will. He knew the structure was capable of putting out 160 kilowatts of constant power all day, but the jump was a surprise anyway. Because of the dust lingering from the recent global dust storm, that day the solar power unit could make only about 75 kilowatts of power. Their 500 kilogram solar concentrator was putting out as much power as the three tonnes of solar panels!
“And look at the rising temperature of the air flowing through the heat exchanger!” added Ethel. Will orally commanded his computer monitor to switch to the heat exchanger and was surprised to see that the air was already exiting at 20 centigrade, and it rose to 23 centigrade while he watched.
“How high can it get?”
“We hope 150 Centigrade. Above that temperature, the plastic structure could be damaged. This thing should be able to put out about 150 kilowatts of heat, though I suppose with the dust in the air, today it’ll be half that. Its total efficiency is about 65%; half of that is electricity and half is heat energy. It’s worth the hundred million in development costs, I think!”
“Yes. I can see why it’s been called a poor man’s
nuke!”
Ethel laughed. “Yes, we get this instead of a nuclear reactor. It’s a lot cheaper and has a much lighter mass. But it’ll require a lot more maintenance and won’t give us much during the dust storm season and practically nothing during a severe global storm. Time will tell which is better.”
“True. The new United States President favors space nuclear power, so we may get a nuke eventually, after all.”
“We’ll see; the Republicans were barely elected and might not have the clout in Congress to re-insert nukes into the NASA budget. I’m getting hungry. Let’s get the other anchor installed on the north side cable, so we can get some lunch. We can’t have the wind blowing this thing around.”
“Right. It looks like we can finish the cables this afternoon. Would you like to join me in a hike to the top of Boat Rock?”
“This afternoon? We’ll be pretty tired when we finish the cables, and I’d like to test the system further. But we could do it first thing tomorrow morning. Do we have permission to climb to the top?”
“Yes, it arrived this morning. Mission control has approved our attempt along a certain route.”
“Okay. But we don’t know whether you and I will be assigned to work together tomorrow.”
“True. But we could request it.”
“Yes, we could. I bet Laura will assign us to work together anyway.” Ethel hesitated. “I think she’s match making.”
“Really?” Will laughed. “Why do you think that?”
“Part of our conversation, last week.” Ethel said nothing more.
----------------------------------
As she predicted, at the brief staff meeting the next morning, Laura assigned them to work together again. Will immediately asked whether the climb to Boat Rock could be done that morning and Laura agreed. David looked disappointed.
So he and Ethel suited up and headed outside. Their first stop—a detour—was the solar concentrator. It was rolled over facing the sun, which was still fairly low in the east. One solar panel strip was easy to see and was blazingly bright in reflected sunlight.
“Look at the power output, though,” said Ethel. “It’s only 142.5 kilowatts.”
“Maybe the pointing isn’t quite right.”
“No.” She reached out and ran a gloved finger along the surface of the balloon. It collected a faint reddish smudge. “Dust. The structure’s plastic has an antistatic coating, but I don’t think it’s working right. We’ll have to monitor this closely. This is a pretty big structure to dust off every few days!”
“That would be a problem,” Will agreed.
Next they headed for the drill, located just thirty meters from the southern end of the solar power structure at the bottom of a depression that had been cut ages ago by catastrophic floodwaters. Each drill’s plastic sleeve was full of cuttings; the two of them slowly pulled them up from the holes and replaced them, then reactivated the drills. They laid the two transparent tubes on the ground, side by side, following the two tubes retrieved just before sunset the day before. Will was pleased.
“We made a lot of progress yesterday, drilling through five meters of loose drift and then ten meters of sedimentary rock.” He pointed. “There’s the transition from loose drift to arkose. You can see the cuttings get a lot more chewed up and there are fewer small particles.”
“I guess the ten million dollar question is, any water yet?”
Will shook his head. “It’s too soon; we’ve got to be down at least ten meters more before the hole begins to give off water vapor from the cut rock. We know that from the ground radar. The pore spaces are ten percent filled with ice at a depth of about thirty meters, according to the radar; that rises to ninety percent at one hundred meters. We have to be patient.”
“So, day after tomorrow we should start to encounter a bit of ice?”
“Yes. Maybe even late tomorrow, if we’re lucky. After that, every day will bring us into wetter rock. My feeling is that we should push both holes as deep as possible before we start water extraction.”
“Two hundred meters?”
“Yes. We’ll reach that depth in about a month, if everything goes well and nothing breaks down. Then we can start piping a large portion of the 150 kilowatts of heat energy down both holes.”
“And up will come moist air. Well, that’s plenty of time to install the condensing units.” She looked at Boat Rock. “Anything else to do here?”
“No. There’s no need for us to walk along the cuttings and dictate a description of each layer because the guys in Moscow can zoom in the camera on the top of the driller and photograph them. After they photograph them, they’ll email questions and we’ll schedule a session to go over them with them.” Will looked up as well. “Let’s go.”
The two of them headed toward Boat Rock. The ground was rolling and rose gradually toward the cliff. In some places, sedimentary rock scoured clean of overburden was easy to see; in other places there were gravel and boulder bars where the water was quieter during the last catastrophic flood to sweep over the area. Now, two billion years later, surveying the dessicated landscape, it was hard to believe that once upon a time the area had been submerged under a hundred or more meters of swift-flowing, boulder and ice-filled water. In many places footprints could be seen in the dust or breaking the duricrust; they had already walked the area extensively and described all the outcrops.
Will called Laura and negotiated more bandwidth; at the moment there were two video cameras inside the habitat broadcasting live images back to Earth. Will and Ethel had to do the same, but four video streams were more than the communications system could handle. Sergei boosted the broadcasting power so that the system could handle three color transmissions, and they decreased the number of frames per second being broadcast to allow four cameras to work at once.
They reached the base of the talus slope and walked westward along it for a hundred meters until they reached the spot where the cliff had failed massively, tumbling rocks as large as bedrooms to the bottom. They began to climb up the rocks, sometimes leaping from top to top, sometimes hiking down and around boulders. In a few minutes they got above the area they had already explored and began to describe boulders as they went, stopping to focus the cameras on each one. In some cases they stopped and zoomed in closely; the sedimentary rocks in the mesa contained occasional thin layers of dark shale. Will had already brought some inside the habitat and looked at it closely under a microscope, but had not found any microfossils.
They took their time, working their way up the jumble boulder by boulder, staying fairly close to each other and watching each other as they climbed. Periodically they stopped or even backtracked to answer questions coming from Earth; American, European, Russian, and Japanese teams of geologists all were authorized to query them, and sometimes the questions took longer than the describing of the site, even with the vetting of questions in Houston.
In two hours they nearly reached the top of mesa. The last stretch was difficult; there were short cliffs, often the sides of boulders, to climb. The last four meters were genuine cliff, but the spot they had headed for was punctuated by two ledges. Will felt for hand and footholds, then pulled himself up to the first ledge; Ethel pushed and helped him balance. He anchored himself well, reached down, and helped pull her up. They walked along the ledge and repeated the pattern to reach the next ledge. From there it was a simple matter to clamber up the last meter and reach the top.
“Well, we made it!” exclaimed Will, pleased and excited. He scanned the horizon quickly, then reminded himself the image would be too jerky and started over, turning himself much more slowly so that his helmet camera would broadcast a clear image back to Earth. Boat Rock was not flat topped, like Layercake Mesa; it had a long hump running down the middle like the keel of a boat, hence its name.
“Boy, this surface has been eroded!” exclaimed Ethel.
“Yes, your geology eye is well trained,” agreed Will. He walked to a circular pit nearby about three meters in diameter and filled with dust. “Here we have a pothole, I think. If we were to excavate the dust we’d find the hard rocks at the bottom that swirled round and round and cut it. We may be a hundred meters above the habitat, but we’re still not above the top of the ancient flood waters!”
They both crouched around the pothole and focused their cameras on it, examining the sandstone into which the pothole had been cut, then pulling out small shovels and digging down into the deposit in it. The wind-blown material was layered as well; they took samples and focused the cameras on each one to get a good-quality close-up shot.
They walked the area, describing the surface, focusing on the layers, working their way up toward the keel. In half an hour they reached the ridge running the length of Boat Rock. Will pulled out a small meteorological station he had brought up in his backpack. The two of them unfolded a square meter of solar paneling, then deployed the meteorological unit and raised its wind velocity boom. By piling boulders around the base they guaranteed it would not blow over. They plugged it into the array and data immediately began to be transmitted back.
“Wind speed, 21 kilometers per hour; good,” said Will, with a smile. “That’s about three times as high as it is at the habitat.”
“So, we do have potential wind power up here,” said Ethel. She looked around. “We can put about twelve MA-2 wind turbines up here, so that’s 18 kilowatts of power. Not much.”
“Except during dust storms,” replied Will. “The wind is three times stronger then, on average, and thus produces nine times more power. So those same wind turbines could make 162 kilowatts of power when the solar panels are producing almost nothing.”
“We just have to get the wind turbines,” she added. “That’ll take a few years.”
“Let’s answer the rest of these geology questions and take a break,” suggested Will. Ethel nodded and they turned back to the geology emails and voice mails. In another fifteen minutes they exhausted the questions in the queue.
Will pointed to two boulders nearby; Ethel nodded and they walked over. She called him on his private phone line. “Let’s talk without a half billion people listening in,” she said.
“Good plan. Let them watch commercials.” He sat on a rock and looked out over the terrain around them. She looked as well and both of them were surprised almost simultaneously by the vista.
“All this time up here I had no idea we had an incredible view around us!” she exclaimed. “It’s really beautiful!”
“It is! Aurorae is beautiful in general with its magnificent cliffs. But from up here the view is spectacular.”
“I love those cliffs. My room faces them and I look at them every morning when I wake up.”
“This place is really growing on me,” said Will. “It’s got the exoticness of the moon but the geological diversity of the Earth. And it’s so ancient! This is a key to understanding the geological evolution of early Earth.”
“Of course, much of your career was based on the moon being the key to understanding early Earth.”
Will smiled. “Well, both of them are!”
She laughed. “I like your humor, Will Elliott.”
“Thank you. I like your grace.”
“My grace?” She was surprised.
“Yes; you have a style, Ethel.”
“Thank you. I think we make quite a pair, actually.” The two of them looked at each other. Their eyes met and something passed between them; something that defied the rules against romance, NASA policy notwithstanding. They spontaneously moved toward each other.
Their helmet bumped. Ethel and Will laughed almost simultaneously. “That’ll teach us to mind the rules!” she said.
“Yes. No kissing outside.”
“And no kissing inside, either,” she added. “Will, there’s no question about it; we are attracted to each other. You’re really special.”
“Thank you. Yes, you’re special to me, too. And you’re right; the next eighteen months is not the time to develop a romance. Here we are worrying about Laura and Sergei getting so close that the team spirit is broken, and we’re in danger of doing the same.”
“It’s Laura’s doing, as I said; she’s playing match maker just to spite me.” Ethel shrugged. “That’s alright, I forgive her. I enjoy the time with you. So, if we can’t have romance, let’s at least be partners in bringing this Columbus 1 team together. What do you think?”
“What do you have in mind?”
“I don’t know. We need a lot more friendship, trust, and rapport with each other. And that’s something we can build.”
“Like the meals we planned?”
“Yes. Laura and Sergei certainly won’t do that, or anything like it.”
“No, it’s not their style. And David’s part of our group as well, so that’s three of six.”
“Shinji is very quiet and private, but I very much like him,” said Ethel. “I think we can get him involved more. He loves cowboy movies, believe it or not; I think we need to propose some team movie nights.”
“Can you work on Laura more, to get her to loosen up?”
Ethel considered. “Yes, I think so. I can talk to her. What about Sergei? I can’t relate to him.”
“But I can; we get along pretty well. I’ll work on Sergei. But what are we trying to do?”
“Duplicate that great meal we pulled off the other day. Get people to know and trust each other more. It strikes me as ridiculous that six people can live close to each other and not know each other, and yet be the entire population of a planet!”
“I agree. We’re all from very different cultures, though. That makes it hard.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Laura and Sergei get along. You and I do. You and David do. I don’t think culture’s our problem.”
“I suspect you’re right. What we need is old-fashioned hospitality and friendship.”
“I think so,” agreed Ethel.
“Okay, let’s do it.” Then Will stood. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve got less than three hours of oxygen left. We’ve got to leave an hour of reserve and it’ll take almost an hour to get down, so we’ve got to get a bit more work done up here before heading down.”
“Yes, you’re right. I’m not looking forward to going down that cliff.”
“We’ll attach a rope permanently to the top and use it to get down.”
“Even so, I still don’t look forward to it!”