Ghosts in the Wind, Part 1 – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
All of the images used in this story were generated by Open AI’s DALL-E 2 software. For more information see: https://openai.com/product/dall-e-2.
Act 1
Olivia had always preferred to read over watching TV or movies, her whole life a book worm, yet here on board the Opportunity she found reading wove itself the smoothest into the routines aboard and the constant hum of all the computers and machinery that were central to their mission. Opportunity had made the six month outbound voyage three times now, yet each trip was a daunting challenge, the crew all settled their affairs before boarding in case they never returned. Olivia had a tearful goodbye with her parents and siblings the day she entered quarantine to prepare for the mission. It was a moment which had rested in her memory for the last four months as they continued ever further from home into the dark unknown.
Opportunity III was a mere relief mission, bringing new astronauts to replace the crew already stationed at Elysium Base, ending their three year mission out on Mars, the furthest of all human outposts in the Solar System. Still, every flight of Opportunity brought the same jitters for while the spacecraft had shuttled astronauts back and forth between Earth and Mars, the allied astronaut corps still had new astronauts allocated to the Mars missions. There were some prerequisites, among which they had to have served a shift at the Shackleton Crater Station on the Moon in the Artemis program, and they had to undergo extensive psychological screenings to ensure they would survive the four years in total they would spend away with Opportunity III. Olivia went to the Moon with Artemis XVI in 2052, a mission that seemed odd to some, considering her specialties in astrobiology and anthropology, yet she proved her merit in the station greenhouse and as a regular contributor to several Space related publications back on Earth with her “Life in the Cosmos” column. That same column was expected to continue throughout Opportunity‘s voyage, and while Olivia was on Mars, yet at this moment her own voyage was far from her mind.
Reading allowed Olivia to forget her troubles in the present if only for a short while. She could imagine herself living in the stories she read, interacting with the characters, living in the places, and experiencing all these stories had to offer firsthand. She especially loved stories about exploration, from the great races to the South Pole of 150 years before to the biographies of mountaineers like Sir Edmund Hilary and the Artemis II astronauts who preceded her own first lunar mission 28 years previously. Whereas her crewmates had brought along playing cards, small musical instruments, and drives filled with movies to pass the voyage, Olivia brought a veritable library on her tablet, a near-endless supply of books. In the first four months she had already made it through seven stories, mostly comedies by Douglas Adams, an old favorite in her family, yet she was unlikely to run out of things to read anytime soon with hundreds more titles stored on her tablet.
She’d grown a bit tired of the comedy though, and turned to a far older book, written 500 years before by another explorer who ventured out from home into the dark unknown of the Atlantic far to the south in Brazil. He was a cosmographer, a sort of anthropologist, biologist, and geographer all wrapped into one, the kind of interdisciplinary skills that would be useful on a mission to Mars where your survival depended on your ability to think fast and outside the box when all the protocols failed. Olivia was fascinated by these older stories; they were written at a time of change when visions of monsters on the edge of the map slowly gave way to a realization of the true diversity of life on Earth. There had been a resurgence of interest in this particular book, the Singularites of France Antarctique by André Thevet since its translation into English twenty years previously, fueling renewed interest in Thevet and France’s attempt at colonizing Brazil in 1555 among English-speaking readers that had previously only been so vibrant in Brazil and France where memory of Thevet’s books had survived. He had many ideas that to Olivia seemed bizarre, such as the idea of giants dwelling in Patagonia, yet she could see the potential in Thevet’s words about the variety of life in Brazil. He had seen a world unlike his own where he observed so many curious things which would redefine life, just as Olivia hoped to do on Mars. Martian life had likely died out millions if not billions of years ago, but she still hoped to be the one to find more evidence of it than just chemical traces of carbon and hydrogen in the Martian rocks. While Thevet devoted his book to a study of the local Tupinambá in Brazil, Olivia had so far used her column to write about life among the small crew heading to Mars.
The mission commander was an American Space Force veteran, Colonel Jim King, who had made the move from active military service to the Astronaut Corps after the last war and had in the last decade served on four Artemis missions and on Opportunity II five years previously. Colonel King was the figure of the old Astronaut corps from the Apollo era, strong jawed, crew cut blond hair, reaching 6 feet tall, with a resolve instilled in him from his cadet days at the Academy in Colorado Springs. Olivia knew some of his service during the war, that he flew missions over hostile territory and engaged in fire on several occasions. Much of his service had been limited to protecting air convoys over the Pacific between Guam and the American forward bases to the northeast. Alongside Jim was his executive officer, a Finnish astronaut named Anneli Korhonen, herself a veteran of the war as well, albeit in the European front where she served as a captain in the Finnish Army with NATO’s forces. Anneli was about 5 ft 6 in tall, strong, with blond hair that had begun to show signs of white. During their prelaunch orientations and training on Earth she quickly became known for her determination and steely resolve to complete her mission, yet always with a deep-rooted passion for serving others. Anneli could be equally stern but had a dry sense of humor, and often enjoyed talking with Olivia about her science and what she hoped to find on Mars. Their other Mission Specialist officer was a younger astronaut, too young to have served like Jim and Anneli, named Jo McGonigle. An American like Jim, Jo came into the astronaut corps after having proven herself in NASA’s robotics division at JPL in Pasadena. She had moved to JPL straight out of her undergraduate years, having earned top place in her class with a B.S. in Engineering at Cal Tech and earned her M.S. while working on the latest Mars rover, Odyssey, that had been sent to the red planet aboard Opportunity II yet had run into trouble with a dust storm in Utopia Planitia that, like the Opportunity rover before it, had covered its solar panels with a film of dust and drained its batteries until it could no longer move. Some quick thinking by Jo caught the attention of the NASA Astronaut Office and she was offered a seat on Opportunity III to work on Odyssey there on the Martian surface. The four person crew was rounded out by Olivia, the mission’s scientist. Before they left Earth several reporters at their last press conference asked Jim what he thought about commanding a mission made up of him and three women, “would it be a flight of the Valkyries?” the newspaper man asked.
Jim chuckled, “It will be a mission to explore with three of the most capable people alive today, and I’m honored to serve alongside them.”
Olivia wasn’t as sure about Jim before that moment, like Jo she wasn’t a veteran, she was a schoolchild during the war, she remembered the fear that her parents radiated, no matter how hard they tried to conceal it for the sake of her brother and her. She grew up knowing war, just as her parents had after 9/11, and her grandparents had during the Cold War. She thought back through her family history one Christmas after dinner with the whole big family and it occurred to her that every generation as far back as she knew had experienced war in some way or another. That was one of the reasons why she was resolved to study astrobiology and anthropology, she wanted to find ways to use science to bring people together, to stop the fighting just long enough for enemies to think of each other as humans. The allies who signed the Artemis Accords in the 2020s at the start of the new generation of lunar exploration closely mirrored the allied countries who fought side-by-side in the last war, and whose common experiences had brought them closer together than ever before. In her lifetime Olivia had seen greater movement toward a global sense of human identity than ever thought possible. Her own country was among the smaller ones in population, yet Canada proved decisive in the Arctic front, protecting the Americas from attacks by air and sea, building a missile defense network that brought Canada onto some much-needed equal footing with the Americans militarily. The kids in her school would gossip and wonder aloud about possible bombers coming over the North Pole to hit the gleaming towers of Toronto, but she always felt safe there. That safety gave her the chance to explore questions that intrigued her about life, space, and human nature. When she was 18, she earned a full scholarship to study biology at the University of Toronto where she stayed for much of the rest of the decade, earning her B.S. and M.S. there, along with a B.S. in Evolutionary Anthropology. While working on her Master’s, she undertook an exhilarating internship at the Royal Ontario Museum in their Natural History Department, and was even offered a full-time position there while she worked on her Ph.D.
It was at this moment that the Canadian Space Agency first contacted her. They were looking for scientists with biology backgrounds who would want to look for evidence of past life on Mars. Olivia had mused about becoming an astronaut like every other schoolkid had since the days of Yuri Gagarin’s first flight, yet that childhood dream hadn’t developed the same way as her interests in terrestrial life. She would need to apply to join the Canadian astronaut corps, complete her Ph.D. in Biology, which if accepted into the program the CSA would willingly fund, and then undergo her astronaut training with her American counterparts in Houston. Olivia took the weekend and began working on her application the following Monday. After a lengthy application process, several interviews, including a board of review, she was accepted into the Canadian Astronaut Corps Class of 2042 as a Science Officer, and given orders to report to Houston for further astronaut training.
By the time she boarded Opportunity III in December 2054 on Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s famed Kennedy Space Center in Florida she had become one of Canada’s more experienced astronauts. Her service aboard Artemis XVI, working to prove a theory that life could exist in microbial form in zero-gravity environments like on the surfaces of comets, had made headlines on Earth, and made her a minor celebrity in Canada. So, the announcement in 2053 that she would be assigned to the crew of Opportunity III was met with a series of talk shows, awards, and honorary doctorates across her home country. More would come, she was warned, when she returned from Mars, especially if she became the one to confirm evidence of past life on the red planet.
Olivia always admired the way that Thevet talked about the diversity of life he encountered that was known around the Atlantic World in his day. His ideas were based on older visions of life and diversity born out of the eyewitness observations of naturalists going back to the days of Aristotle and Pliny in antiquity. Thevet had a way, no matter how outdated it was, of capturing the wonder of experiencing finding unknown life for the first time. The proof that there were things out there still to discover was all the motivation Olivia needed to buckle herself into her seat on the Opportunity and be launched with the power of a pair of next generation SLS rockets out of the atmosphere and beyond Earth orbit on her six month voyage to Mars. Thevet traveled to Brazil in 1555 onboard an old wooden ship powered with sails by the wind. The Opportunity was largely driven by its engines, yet a pair of solar sails inspired by the Planetary Society’s Light Sail 2 mission of the 2020s also helped propel the Opportunity starship on its voyage, carried by the power of the solar winds. She marveled at this technology, which was expertly managed and maintained by Jo at her engineering station. The sails had to be kept at just the right degree of exposure to the Sun to work, and needed monitoring for space debris to ensure they would not get torn or picked apart by the untold numbers of microscopic particles floating about in Space, pieces of comets and asteroids broken apart in collisions or by the gravitational pull of the planets and their moons. Thevet and his fellow Frenchmen had to be ready not only for natural dangers in the open Atlantic and along the European, African, and South American coasts, but for Portuguese ships who patrolled the South Atlantic waters between their colonies in Brazil, East Africa, and India. Luckily for Olivia and her crewmates, they would not need to worry about attack from a hostile vessel on their own voyage, “unless someone is out there who doesn’t want us going to Mars,” Jim joked on one occasion, so in at least one aspect her own voyage had remained safer, and by all accounts more uneventful, than Thevet’s had been.
She saw something of a common link between herself and the cosmographer, a bond that stretched across five centuries between explorers venturing out into what was only recently explored territory for the both of them in their own time. They weren’t the first to arrive on their respective alien shores, yet even on these later voyages in the first generations of travel between worlds a certain amount of danger was ever present. During Artemis XVI she proved that water ice frozen in zero gravity had the potential to hold microbial life, so finding the fossilized remains of some ancient Martian seemed possible, though Olivia didn’t want to get her hopes up with the whims of luck. There was some evidence of water ice on the Martian surface, the many probes and rovers that’d been sent from Earth to investigate Mars had been sending data about that ice back for decades, yet Olivia would be the first astrobiologist to set foot on the Martian surface. They had a mere month left until their arrival when she could set to work.
Five months aboard the Opportunity had given her ample time to comb through all the rover data collected since Sojourner, the first of the rovers, arrived in the Chryse Planitia in July 1997. With 58 years of information available to her, Olivia had done her homework and began her survey of Martian water ice, with a particular focus on the later rovers, Curiosity, Opportunity, and Perseverance. In the 15 years since Opportunity I first brought humans to the Martian surface and established a base on Elysium Planitia, a broad equatorial plane where the InSight rover landed in 2018. It was a region that once had the geological activity necessary to facilitate life, the plain was dominated by Elysium Mons, a 41,000 foot tall volcano, the third highest peak on Mars. The Alliance’s leaders chose Elysium Planitia as their Martian base of operations figuring that its recent geological activity (as recent as 50,000 years ago) could make it a strong candidate for terraforming in the distant future.
The Elysium Base had stood firm against all odds for 15 years, and its latest crew was ready for their five year rotation on the planet to be at an end. Olivia worried that she wouldn’t be able to stand living on Mars for a full five years. It was a very long time to be away from home, from her family. She chose to keep her lakefront condo near Sunnyside Beach, her brother’s family could use it while she was away, and it gave her somewhere to think about going home to when she became tired of living in the Elysium Base. Resupply missions to Elysium arrived every 18 months from Earth, a new spacecraft launching from either NASA’s Kennedy Space Center or ESA’s Guiana Space Center carrying new crews to Mars every two and a half years. This meant there was always a new crew overlap, so NASA’s Opportunity crews were not alone up there, instead joined by ESA’s Metis crews. When Olivia and the Opportunity III crew were going into quarantine at Kennedy there were reports that the Australians and Japanese were interesting in adding their own series of joint missions to Elysium’s resupply schedule alongside their individual missions, meaning the base which normally could house up to 20 astronauts would need to be expanded to meet the needs of new missions arriving every year rather than every two and a half years as it stood.
A voice came from the engineering station of Opportunity, “Dr. Stephens,” Olivia turned at hearing her family name, “can you come up here and take a look at these readings?”
“Sure,” she took a hold of one of the hand bars that were strategically placed along the length of Opportunity‘s central corridor, propelling herself in zero gravity forwards to where Jo sat at her station on duty occupied with some atmospheric readings they’d taken a few weeks before of Mars following the dust storm that drained Odyssey‘s batteries. Olivia reached engineering with only a few passing breaths and found Jo gazing intently at a screen on which appeared a three dimensional image of the Martian surface and atmosphere around Elysium Planitia. “What’d you find?” Olivia asked, peering over Jo’s shoulder.
Jo turned away from her monitor, “The rover appears to have kicked up some dust from the surface that has traces of carbon in it, which leads me to wonder if this could be evidence that something once lived down there.”
“Can you tell by the wind speed and direction where the dust came from? How far it might’ve traveled across the surface?” Olivia asked, recognizing an opportunity to realize her own mission.
“Well, windspeeds of at least 18 to 22 meters per second are needed for these dust storms to form, and this was a doozy, so I’d guess we’re looking at winds around 25 m/s that got kicked up by and funneled around Elysium Mons, so honestly it could’ve come from anywhere.”
Olivia sighed. On Earth she would be able to follow well-tracked weather patterns to see where dust originated. In North America, the continent she was the most familiar with, summer winds came from the southwest and winter ones from the northwest. The one wild card out there were the lake effect weather patterns that made winters snowier in her part of the continent around Lake Ontario. Yet on Mars the climate was still only just being explored and understood, and not enough data existed to use these same models to make sense of where this dust originated. Yet if she could track it, somehow, someway, then she might be able to follow the breadcrumbs to the rocks where it originated, and if those rocks had traces of carbon in them then it was possible there could be fossils.
“Do we have any satellite data from the Mars orbiters on that storm?” Olivia asked, looking Jo in the eye hoping the engineer might be able to surprise her yet again with some ingenious work-around.
Jo turned back to her monitor and ran a search on Mars satellites for six months previously, the storm was first recorded in the mission control centers on Earth in October last year. “One of India’s Mars Orbiter satellites was in orbit over Elysium Planitia at the time of the storm’s impact,” Jo replied.
The Indian Space Agency was not a part of the alliance, yet they also had stayed out of the big confrontations between the various allied space agencies and their rivals, preferring to let those organizations open a clear path for India to become a viable third power in the latest round of the Space Race.
“What do you say we give Houston a call?” Olivia said.
“It wouldn’t hurt, the Indians have nothing to lose in helping us,” Jo replied, locking her monitor and moving out of her station. Olivia let her pass, and Jo floated forward toward the helm where Jim and Anneli sat, the mission commander and his executive officer at their posts. Jim was operating the helm when they arrived, while Anneli did her duty of making sure nothing went awry until her own duty shift at the helm began in five hours.
Jo reached the helm first, turned to their commander asking “Jim, can we add an item to our next transmission back to Houston?”
“What’s on your mind?” he asked, turning to see both the engineer and science officers at his door.
“We think we might have a way to trace the origins of that dust storm that hit Elysium Planitia in last October, but the only satellite that saw it was Mangalyaan-4,” Jo replied in her usual earnestness.
“So, we need Houston to request the data and possible video from the Indians,” Olivia continued, “If we can trace the origin of that storm then we might be able to find the source of those carbon traces in the dust–”
“Which might lead to evidence of past life,” Anneli finished Olivia’s thought. “It’s a reasonable request, I imagine the Indians would be okay with that.”
Jim turned to his monitor, “I’ll add it to the list. Our next transmission window is at the end of my shift here in five hours. We’ll see what Houston can do.”
“Thanks, Jim,” Olivia said, smiling as she turned back toward her own science station near the rear of the craft.
“On the Moon you chased ice, and on Mars it sounds like you’ll be chasing dust,” Jo said as the pair floated back to their stations. “If they ever send you out any further maybe they’ll have you chasing shadows or ghosts on the Jovian moons.”
Olivia laughed, “That’s Space for you, you never know what you’re going to find.”
Olivia left Jo at engineering and soon found her way back into her own station. Her science station was small, as was engineering. It consisted of a monitor hoisted onto the bulkhead, a microscope, and a keyboard to control it all. Until some engineer could figure out how to create artificial gravity there was little reason to try to bring desk chairs let alone desks on board a starship like the Opportunity, the occupant and anything else left on that desk or in that chair would just float away.
Olivia went back to her own monitor, pulling up what little data she had on the dust storm already. Most of it was collected by the Emirati Hope orbiter and NASA’s MAVEN orbiter, the two oldest spacecraft still in operation over Mars and uploaded to the computers aboard Opportunity while they were still on the launchpad in Florida. She could see this storm was not as violent as some had been, it hadn’t ensnared the whole planet for one thing, but it did enough damage regionally around Elysium Planitia that even the Elysium base on the far side of Elysium Mons went into lockdown, its crew relocating to their bunkers carved deep into the Martian rock. The NASA reports talked about winds rising out of the north and driving dust up onto the Nepenthes Mensae, burying areas of exposed rock that had previously been considered possible locations where a geologist currently stationed at Elysium named Dr. Rosalind O’Brien might be able to study a wide range of Martian strata, yet now those rock layers were buried under meters of dust and soil. She met Dr. O’Brien once at a SETI conference in 2050 held in the Bavarian mountain town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where the geologist presented a paper arguing that further study of Martian strata could prove greater nuance in the accepted geological chronology of the planet, that there was more of a nuance to the early few million years of the current Amazonian Period, named after the Amazonis Planitia located to the west of Elysium Base.
There was another month of space travel ahead for Olivia and the other three members of the Opportunity III mission, another month of staring at outdated sensor data, hoping the Indian Space Agency would grant their request of data from Mangalyaan-4, and wondering about what five years of life on Mars would truly be like for her.
Act 2
The final month seemed to take far longer to pass, yet with each day the red hue of Mars grew larger and larger in the Opportunity‘s forward windows until at last it dominated the horizon. Jim directed the spacecraft into a low orbit that would three days after their arrival over Mars position them just rightly to begin their descent to the surface. There had been some considerations among the NASA engineers to hold Opportunity III for another year until a new prototype landing shuttle could be loaded onto the ship but there remained too many issues. As it stood, the Opportunity would need to successfully descend through the Martian atmosphere to the surface and then upon its return mission ascend back up through the atmosphere and into orbit to begin its long voyage home to Earth. Olivia was told of the dangers of landing the spacecraft on the surface and that if she wanted to, the CSA would happily hold her ticket to Mars for the next mission, likely the next Metis mission to be launched from French Guiana, that would use shuttles for all atmospheric flying and keep the spacecraft in orbit, but she was too eager to take to Space at the earliest moment. Her return trip would use the new shuttle system, by that time in two years the Opportunity would never leave Space, the remainder of its services would be conducted in orbit of either Earth, Mars, or the Moon where it would be refueled, restocked, and where its crew would come aboard. The allied space agencies were even in the early stages of discussing orbital space docks like Olivia had come to know in science fiction, “but surely,” she thought “those are decades away.”
For the first few orbits she found it hard to focus on her work for she was drawn to the port windows that looked out over Mars. She had lived in Earth orbit on the space station and briefly stayed in lunar orbit on Gateway Station, but looking down at Mars was a wonder to behold for how alien the planet seemed below her. Sitting down at dinner with Jim, Anneli, and Jo at the end of their first day in orbit Jim called her out on it, “aren’t you supposed to be packing for the trip down?”
Olivia blushed, “Sorry, Colonel, I mean Jim,” she stumbled over her words, “I just can’t help but look down there at all that red, all that dust.”
“You’ll be there for two years,” Anneli said, “take more time to look out into the blackness of Space, that’s what you’ll end up missing. You have years of the red planet ahead of you.”
“If you’re going to miss anything,” Jim had stopped eating and stared out towards the bulkhead behind Olivia, “it’s the blue and green of Earth. You don’t really realize just how beautiful home is until you’ve seen it from above. I remember my first time flying over the Bahamas on my way to Puerto Rico, seeing all that blue and those stretches of sand they call islands in the middle of the Caribbean. Gorgeous!” Jo laughed, smiling at the thought of the warm blue waters of the Caribbean. Jim continued, “You don’t realize it until you’re gone how much you miss home. I think that’s really why you’re entranced by Mars down there, Dr. Stephens,” he winked at her prior formality, “it’s because subconsciously you think of Earth as the poster child of planets, it’s the one you expect to see out your window in orbit. But here instead of all that blue and green with deep white clouds all you see is red and occasional white ice gleaming on the surface. If Earth is the poster child of a planet, then Mars is our most cherished example of an alien world, familiar yes but foreign still.”
Olivia leaned back in her chair, catching her tear of baguette that threatened to float away through the mess, “I guess I do miss home.”
“We all do,” Jim sighed, “it’s one of those things we all feel but rarely talk about. For some it’s just too painful to admit how much they miss home.”
Anneli nodded, “there’s nothing quite like being there with my family, hearing the tram bells rolling down the streets of Helsinki.”
“Even stoic Anneli misses home” Olivia thought, she could swear she hadn’t seen as much as an emotion on the Finn’s face before now, but there she was brow furrowed, imagining herself walking along the boulevards of her Nordic hometown.
“What about you, Jo?” Jim asked, turning to his right to look at the youngest member of their crew.
Jo’s eyes betrayed what she’d been feeling all along, “I love being out here, I love the work, but it’s different for me. I left home almost 20 years ago to go to school, to become an engineer at Cal Tech and to work for JPL. There are a handful of other Kansas Citians who work there, but not many. Normally, I’d see my family maybe twice or three times a year at Christmas and Easter, and maybe for 4th of July but that’s about it. I followed my passion but left a part of my heart behind.”
Olivia was taken aback hearing that from Jo. She knew Jo back on Earth before they were assigned to Opportunity III from different NASA-JPL events. Jo was the one who tinkered with any sort of computers or machinery. She became well known for her practicality in every aspect of her life, she kept her hair short so it wouldn’t get stuck in any of the computers, gadgets, or other machinery that she worked with. Jim had done his commander’s duty by inspecting Opportunity on the launchpad in Florida before they took off but was happily one-upped by the meticulous and eternally curious Jo who was already halfway through examining the ship atop its SLS rocket when Jim arrived for his inspection. Olivia and Anneli were there with Jim, pre-flight inspections were something they both heard Jim liked his crews to do with him, and Olivia could swear she saw a grin on Jim’s face that could only be described as pride in Jo’s attention to detail and to the crew’s safety. To Olivia then, Jo was the model hard worker, unflinching in her attention to duty, and passionate about the things she’d designed and built. So, hearing that Jo was homesick, even on the ground in the labs and workshops at JPL in Pasadena was a surprise. She came from a big Irish Catholic family, that much Olivia knew, after all the few McGonigles she knew in Toronto were very proud of their origins in Derry, so she imagined Jo’s family was probably from around there too, though how many generations removed Jo was from Ireland Olivia wasn’t sure.
Despite her tears Jo showed a toughness in her eyes that only bonded her with her crewmates even more. They’d been together now for nearly eight months, two on Earth at Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers preparing for their mission and the long six months there on their long way out to Mars. Now that the red glow of the planet’s surface shone in their windows and on all their monitors and screens, they each let their guard down, these four knew each other better now than nearly anyone else alive knew them after all the time they’d spent together in this isolation.
Jim broke the silence, announcing “we’re scheduled to descend into orbit tomorrow. This’ll be Opportunity‘s third time going down to the Martian surface. I think she’ll hold up; she hasn’t failed us yet. Be prepared for a delay in case of any bad weather on the surface. We have enough fuel remaining here to maintain our present orbit for another two days if we have to but trust me it’ll be better for all of us if we land on schedule and stretch our legs in Elysium Base.”
“We all know the backup plan,” Anneli said, finishing her own meal.
Jim looked at Olivia and Jo who both nodded in agreement. “Good,” he said, setting his hands down on the table with finality, “then let’s get some sleep. Be sure to have your things packed and ready to disembark one hour before we enter the descent stage. I don’t want anything floating about that could rediscover gravity floating over the wrong buttons on each of our stations as we descend.
“Understood,” Olivia said nodding.
“Well, good night then. Sleep well, it’s going to be one hell of a day tomorrow.”
The four turned away from the table and floated to their respective bunks. Jim and Anneli slept in a pair of forward bunkbeds near the helm while Jo and Olivia took a pair closer to their own stations near the middle of Opportunity‘s long cylindrical hull. As they had every night for the past six months Jo and Olivia took turns in the midships lavatory with Olivia taking to her bunk first. She laid her head back on her pillow, the same old pillow she’d used now since leaving Earth. She’d grown so used to the texture and smell of it and the sleeping bag she used, as well as the straps that kept it from floating away mid-sleep that she felt a pang of sorrow at leaving them. “That’s not right, you’re an explorer Olivia, you should be excited for the new adventure down there, a new bed even!” she thought. As her eyes closed, she found herself imagining home, her condo looking out over Lake Ontario, her family gathered around celebrating her nephew Georgie’s birthday party. “Georgie’s turning three soon,” she thought, “I need to record a video outside on the surface for him” to send home. Tears came to her eyes as she thought of yet another birthday she’d miss all for Mars.
The next morning came fast, Olivia awoke to her alarm thinking she’d only just closed her eyes maybe a half hour ago to discover it’d been seven long hours, seven hours like every other night’s sleep she’d had on the Opportunity. She pulled the curtains of her bunk back and saw Jo was already up, floating horizontally above the floor tinkering behind a wall panel with some wiring. “Morning,” Olivia said groggily.
“Morning,” Jo waived a hand that held some tool in it that Olivia couldn’t make out at her. Jo was a kind and gentle person, but when she was in the zone, she never really noticed others around her; her work was all-consuming.
Olivia unstrapped her sleeping bag, rolling her legs out of her bunk in the bag and letting it drop to the floor below. She caught it in her left hand and placed it up onto her bunk, buckling the strap over it to keep it from floating away. She caught her reflection in the lavatory mirror, the door just ajar ahead of her. Her hair was a mess, bedhead, she learned, was still a thing even in the zero gravity of Space. Pushing herself into the lavatory she opened the metal cabinet behind the mirror and took her plastic hair brush out, doing her best to get a handle on her locks so she could put them up into a ponytail as she so often had done during this voyage. Zero gravity made water float rather than settle, making hair washing a tremendous challenge that even the finest engineers and scientists had yet to solve. She’d once heard Jo mutter something from the lavatory about gravity plating and figured if anyone could solve the problem of generating artificial gravity without building a massive rotating space station like Sir Arthur Clarke’s Clavius Base in 2001: A Space Odysseyor Gerard K. O’Neill’s The High Frontier then it’d be Jo McGonigle and the JPL team she’d certainly lead after her successful mission to repair the Odyssey rover.
Feeling ready to move on with the morning, Olivia floated into the mess and took yet another dehydrated packet out of the breakfast compartment, settling down to some cereal. “You know, I hear they have real food in Elysium,” Jim said, sitting at the table legs crossed reading something on his tablet. Olivia laughed at the sight, “You look like my dad reading the Star at the breakfast table.”
Jim looked up at her and his momentary uncertainty melted into a beaming, laughing smile. “I met your dad at Johnson, right?”
“Yeah, my parents came down from Toronto to see me before we went into quarantine.”
Jim remembered the couple in their late sixties, hair grayed, faces beaming with pride at their daughter’s accomplishments. “You know how proud they are of you, right?” he asked, lowering his tablet ever more slightly.
Olivia smiled, “Yeah, they want me to send them a message as soon as we’re able to walk on the surface of all those red rocks. Dad joked, as he does, that it’ll be just like the Garden of the Gods only without a breathable atmosphere.”
“Just like it, indeed,” Anneli entered the mess from behind Jim, taking a seat next to the colonel. “I just heard from Elysium, they say ‘clear skies and an empty space for us to park on Landing Pad Charlie.”
“Good to hear,” Jim replied in a tone that was both formal and hopeful, “so maybe we won’t have to orbit for another night after all.”
“What time are we entering descent again?” Olivia asked.
“10:42 if all goes to plan, but that depends on if we’re ready. What’s Jo working on now?”
“I’m not sure,” Olivia said, “she’s behind one of the wall panels midship by our bunks. I’ll go ask her, you enjoy your paper,” Olivia smiled at Jim and turned pushing off the walls of the mess and out the door into the hallway back toward where Jo still floated above the deck at midships. She seemed to be near the end of her tinkering based on how many tools were now strapped to various parts of her belt. “Is everything okay with the circuits here?” Olivia asked.
Jo looked up, smiling, “oh yeah, everything’s fine here. I just had an idea of how we could boost our communications signal enough to use Opportunity as a relay for signals coming from Elysium back to Earth to clear up some of the pixelation they’ve been getting down on Mars.”
Olivia thought more about it now and remembered seeing that some of the communications lines ran through the bulkhead at midships, which made sense considering the engineering and science stations were the ones that needed the greatest bandwidth to send and receive transmissions from Earth, the Moon, Mars, and all the orbital stations they’d been in communication with. On some of the earlier Mars missions that the Allies sent they’d included a communications security officer whose job was in part to defend the ship from any potential threats that the old adversaries from the war had left in Earth and lunar orbit and on the Moon, as well as to keep all external communications encrypted while decrypting potential rival transmissions when Earth’s superpowers were still racing to be first to establish bases on Mars. The Allies: Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States made it there first and now twenty years after the war ended their Elysium Base remained the only human outpost on Mars. Still, in those early days of crewed Martian exploration in the 2030s the allied space agencies were directed by their governments to protect their communications from interception at all costs.
The rest of the morning went quickly, Olivia finished packing up her station, putting all of her equipment and personal belongings into their places in her bags before the call came back from Jim, “suit up, we’re preparing for the descent.”
Olivia hadn’t put her spacesuit on over her flight suit in a good while, possibly since they’d left Earth orbit, but she still remembered the drill. She and Jo climbed into the backs of their suits, zipping each other up before putting on their helmets and sealing them. Both wore mobile oxygen tanks that were spread across their backs that could provide up to 10 hours of breathable air, enough to get them onto the surface and into the oxygenated internal atmosphere of Elysium Base. Olivia felt the excitement rise in her, the moment reminding her of descending through clouds towards a new country she’d never visited before. She followed Jo up to the seats just behind the helm and strapped herself in, ready for what was sure to be a memorable descent.
In order to enter the Martian atmosphere and safely land on the surface Opportunity would need to angle itself with the helm facing upward toward the sky and its engines downward. Landing struts would protrude from the bottom of the spacecraft’s cylinder hull and take the force of the landing. It was a system that’d been in use for forty years at this point, since just before the start of the Artemis program, but it was practical for the technology they were still using. The shuttlecraft in development would be able to land like the old Space Shuttles of the late twentieth century facing forward on wheels or skis like airplanes do on Earth, though Jo had mentioned one design that allowed for vertical takeoff and landing that would make the whole process even easier than ever imagined outside of the dreams of science fiction writers.
“Opportunity to Elysium, we are ready to begin our descent,” Jim said over the comms.
There was a short pause. “Elysium to Opportunity, we read you. You are cleared for descent. See you soon!”
Jim turned to Anneli, “Okay, Captain, begin the rotation sequence.”
Anneli flipped several switches and pressed several buttons on the monitor in front of her, “rotation sequence underway. 3 minutes to descent positioning.”
“Good. Jo, Olivia, you two keep an eye on our telemetry, make sure our fuel and heat levels stay within safety parameters.”
“Understood,” the pair sitting behind the helm said in unison. Olivia wanted to look over at Jo, but she knew she had a job to do, a job that if done carelessly could cost the four of them their lives.
Olivia felt Opportunity turn on its axis and watched as the Martian surface rotated in the helm’s windows before disappearing from view. Anneli called the moment, “rotation sequence complete. Switching to descent thrusters.”
Olivia felt a jolt as the ship began to move backwards, or rather downwards. Mars still remained out of view, Anneli and Jim were controlling the trajectory of the ship with their monitors only. She was glad she was sitting where she was with Jo, not up front. Sure, she’d trained to pilot the Opportunity, should its commander and helmswoman be incapacitated, but she had hoped that moment would never come, especially during the descent stage into a planetary atmosphere.
“How’re you two doing back there?” Jim called over the comms.
“All systems are nominal,” was Jo’s reply.
Jim shook his head, a chuckle sounded over the comms “Olivia?”
“I’m okay, but I’ve just got one question.”
“What’s that, doc?” Jim replied.
“When will Mars be in view again?” Olivia shouted back over the sound of the engines behind her.
Jim laughed, “It takes some getting used to, falling like we are into a planetary atmosphere without being able to see where we’re going. What do you think, Captain?”
Anneli looked at her monitor, “We should be able to see the outer atmosphere pass by the helm in 30 seconds.”
Olivia counted down the seconds in her head, “one and two and three and,” as she was taught in the Scouts as a kid. Back then it was to measure more mundane things like the amount of time it took to run from one cabin to another up at Haliburton Camp, but now it was all she had to find some comfort in the moment of falling down to the Martian surface backwards without being able to see where she was going.
“twenty-six and twenty-seven and twenty-eight and twenty-nine and thirty, oh!” she caught her breath in her throat, coughing, as the heat began to build up behind her, rising along the hull as the glow of the Martian atmosphere came into view, by which point they were descending through the carbon dioxide rich layers toward the surface. Olivia looked down at her monitor and saw readings from the hull thermometers, things were looking normal, if 1377 degrees Celsius felt anything but normal to her. She tracked their distance from Landing Pad C in the upper left corner of the monitor, they fast approached the 230 km mark at the upper edge of the Thermosphere, where the temperature readings hit a chilly -98.15 degrees Celsius or 175 degrees Kelvin, the two units of temperature that Opportunity’s computers displayed.
“We’re close to terminal velocity,” Anneli called.
“Hold on!” Jim shouted as Olivia looked down to see that they’d reached the Mesosphere about 100 km above the surface. “Elysium, we’re getting closer, get ready for us.”
“Roger,” the Elysium mission controller called back.
Olivia began to feel more at ease as she saw the red dust of the Martian surface reflect off of the planet’s atmosphere, it did remind her of the American West, but more of the desert rocks in Utah than the Garden of the Gods in Colorado.
“Entering the Troposphere,” Anneli announced, “prepare for landing.”
Olivia stole a glance over at Jo who had a strange mix of terror and joy on her face, their eyes locked for a moment before they returned to their monitors.
Anneli’s voice returned over the comm, “Impact in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.” Olivia felt the landing struts meet their mark on Landing Pad C. “Colonel, we have landed.”
Jim leaned his head back, a clear sigh of relief fogging up his helmet visor for a moment. “Elysium Base, this is Colonel James King, Commanding Officer of Opportunity III, requesting permission to come aboard.”
“Permission granted, Colonel. Welcome to Mars!”
Olivia felt herself speaking before she realized it, “21 May 2055, I’ve made it!”
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 