On Mars Pathfinder (The Mike Lane Stories Book 1)

by Jim Melanson

  The Lander started buffeting slightly in the thin atmosphere of Mars, only about ten percent as dense as on Terra. I could feel the buffeting turn into a thrumming feeling coming through the couch. Eventually that thrumming became a teeth chattering sensation. Thin atmo or not, this was going to be a ride!

  There would be no ionization blackout for telemetry during re-entry. Mission Control would continue to receive the stream uninterrupted. Both the Mar-Sat and the Jalopy-Sat had a TDRS installed. The Tracking and Data Relay System was able to transmit and receive telemetry signals from the forward (topside) antenna array on the Lander, through a small space in the ionization envelope created by the shape of the Lander itself (topside was pointed backwards during re-entry). Otherwise there would have been almost a full minute of blackout as the Lander was on a very shallow trajectory to the landing site. I would be completing almost a full half orbit before touchdown. The Landers descent needed this extra distance due to the very thin Martian atmosphere being such an important part of the aerobraking/deceleration process. As I was heading towards the planet surface, the Jalopy-Sat was already moving itself to a more northerly geosynchronous position, to have better oversight on the colony.

  I had been orbiting Mars at roughly 6 kilometres per second. That meant the descent time was going to be about 25 minutes to cover the low angle distance, and slow down the Lander. The robotics packages that had arrived in the past few years landed much faster. They also had significantly less mass than I did. The supply drops and systems delivery (Habitat, Atmo-Gen, Hydrazine Plant, etc.) had all taken almost a full 50 minutes for descent. Maximum use of the thin Martian atmosphere was required because of the exceptional mass of those objects. The Habitats alone were about seven tonnes each. However, all had landed safely and intact according to telemetry and visuals from the rover, Big Dawg. Big Dawg and Little Dawg had been dropped in the first investigation package to land at Chasma Boreale, four years ago.

  The pressure system in my Activity Suit was activated around my upper body (as opposed to lower body during ascent), but it wasn’t squeezing me like a tube of cheese, as the pressure suit had during ascent, and trajectory burn. The pressure suit was primarily needed for acceleration and the descent of the craft was all deceleration.

  I began to see a faint red glow outside the windows. The aeroshell on the bottom of the Lander was getting extremely hot from the friction of the Martian atmosphere. Even though at this altitude it was about 1% as dense as the Terran atmosphere, there was still a thin atmosphere that was dense enough to be using it for the initial braking effect.

  Fourteen minutes into the descent, the next critical phase came up on the timeline. While the atmospheric friction had slowed down the Lander considerably, it was still going too fast to deploy the three parachutes. If they were deployed at this point, they would rip right off the top of the Lander, and probably taking the top of the Lander with them. What came first was the firing of RAD assemblies (Rocket Assisted Descent engines). There were two disposable RAD assembly frames on the bottom of the Lander, plus the final third assembly attached to the Lander itself. These RAD assemblies had the brunt of responsibility for getting me safely to the surface.

  Before any of that could happen though, the aeroshell had to be discarded. I was now moving slow enough, and in a thin enough atmosphere that the aeroshell was no longer needed as a heat shield. I felt a slight jolt from the jettison rockets after the control system had blown the couplings to the aeroshell, propelling it out of the path of the ballistic Lander.

  When the first RAD assembly ignited, I was slammed into the flight couch again. This lasted for seventeen seconds. After the seventeen second burn elapsed, the first stage RAD engines cut out. Almost immediately, tiny launching rockets fired three, one pound metal Monkey’s Fists from three points on the top of the Lander. These small weights pulled and arched the drogues for the parachutes out far enough to not get tangled in each other. The larger than normal drogues, catching the thin atmo filled out; and pulled out the much larger than normal three main parachutes right behind them. All three parachutes deployed simultaneously. After the first RAD assembly cut out, I went back into free fall for about seven seconds (an eternity it seemed), before I felt the parachutes give drag to the Lander’s descent. Ten seconds after the RAD cut-off, the first RAD assembly ejector units released that first frame. It fell from the bottom of the Lander, engines, and fuel tanks attached to them.

  The release of the parachutes was a pivotal moment. They had been pressure packed and frozen in the cold of deep space for over eight months. There was the ever-so-slight risk they simply wouldn’t deploy. I didn’t hear anything, but I did feel them and see them deploy through the dorsal portal. Aside from them deploying at all, the concern was that all three of them should deploy, and that they should all deploy at the same time. If one had failed, I would still survive the landing but I would have gone wildly off course, winding up too far from the Habitat to make it there on my own. Thankfully I could see all three had snapped into full shape. The effect was like being suddenly slammed in the back as my own body’s momentum dug into the flight couch; the flight couch which was again no longer travelling as fast as I was. This only lasted about two or three seconds. I started breathing easier as the speed of the couch and the momentum of my body came into balance.

  These parachutes were not for a straight descent purpose. The Lander was tilted backwards, moving forward through the thickening atmosphere, the aeroshell absorbing the increasing friction heat. It was still going quite fast. The parachutes were providing the necessary drag to slowly bleed off more speed from the forward momentum. The mass of the Lander and its initial speed compounded by the thin atmosphere meant that the parachute assisted aero-braking was still going to take some time. I was going to be under canopy, relatively speaking, for another ten minutes. In the final 50 seconds of the canopy braking, the Lander had slowed enough that it was now under a direct parachute descent over the colony site, over my new home. However, the parachutes, while fine for braking, were woefully inadequate for straight descent. I started picking up speed again, slowly.

  Roughly twenty-four minutes after separating from the MTV, the second of three RAD rocket assemblies would fire. The Rocked Assisted Descent motors took over, and did what the atmosphere and parachutes couldn’t do. They would get me safely to the surface, and on target.

  A full second before this next RAD assembly fired, the flight computer fired three tiny rocket propelled guillotines, which cut the parachute harness for each of the canopies. That one second of time allowed the Lander and parachute canopies to move far enough apart, that the falling parachutes would not interfere with the rest of the Landing sequence.

  With the second RAD assembly engines instantly coming to full power, I was thrust deeper into the flight couch as the ship slowed dramatically in the space of a few seconds. These engines burned for twenty seconds as they positioned the Lander over the final landing site, and slowed my descent considerably. On cue, three small explosions jettisoned the second RAD assembly. At that instant, because I was so close to the colony site, two rockets on the second discarded RAD assembly came to life. Those small rockets carried the assembly several kilometres down-field where it crashed into the sand dunes of Hyperboreae Undae. Had I been able to look out the starboard portal, I would have seen it crash in the distance. I thought briefly about the amount of litter I was creating. I was going to have to go around and pick this stuff up some day. Yeah, I could still hug trees even if there are no actual trees to hug.

  The second RAD assembly had slowed me drastically, almost to a complete stop of downward motion. With the second RAD assembly jettisoned and flying off to the south, the Lander began a vertical free fall descent.

  Very quickly, at 60 metres above the surface of Mars, the third and final RAD cluster fired. As this final assembly was attached directly to the hull of the Lander, I could hear the three engines, and they were loud. I soon heard another mec
hanical sound or perhaps I just felt it. This was the six landing struts being deployed. My excitement was becoming unbearable. The firing of the third and final RAD assembly brought me to a complete stop at 3 metres above the surface. As the RAD quickly burned out, the Lander settled with a hard jolt onto the surface of the planet, the design of the landing legs causing them to act as shock absorbers, cushioning the final drop.

  I scanned all the instrumentation and took a deep breath. It hit me hard as the sound of the RAD engines faded. I was finally on Mars. I WAS FINALLY ON FREAKING MARS!!! I let out a war whoop of joy, and pumped my fists in the air. The good Lord had delivered me safely. I was finally here and I couldn’t wait to get out of the tin can, to put my space-suited foot on the surface. I pulled the three restraint release levers, and bounded out of my seat. I came out of it so fast I almost went ass over tea-kettle, catching myself just in time. Oh yes, one-third gravity. It had been a long time since I had been in gravity (almost eight and a half months), so I took a moment to let my body, brain, and organs get used to the concept again; and let the brief wave of accompanying nausea pass. I pulled up the Mar-Sat image of the landing site on my tablet. I was only off by 17 metres. That’s a lot, but again, Chasma Boreale is a windy place. I was only about half a kilometre from the Hab (Habitat) as planned. In retrospect, being only 17 metres off target after travelling over one hundred and sixty million kilometres wasn’t that bad at all.

  I touched the COM button on my suit controller and transmitted a message to Terra. I said, “Mission Control, Pathfinder. I’m happy to report I touched down about a minute ago. It was completely successful and went according to plan. I’m preparing to exit the Lander now.” The message system was on live feed so as I talked, the Lander uplinked the signal to Mar-Sat. The audio was on its way to Terra as fast as I was saying the words. The worlds wouldn’t arrive though, for another 18 minutes and 20 seconds (approximately).

  A shadow passed over the port side portal. I glanced that way but couldn’t see anything. It had to be one of the parachutes following the Lander down.

  I moved over to where the handheld camera was stored, unboxed it, turned it on and made sure it was recording. It had been hooked into the ships system and began to top off the battery charge when the Lander powered up in orbit. The battery was full, and would record for twelve hours non-stop before needing to be recharged. The handheld camera itself could record over three hundred hours of video imagery before I had to download it. I had two cameras on my Activity Suit as well. One was outboard on the helmet recording wherever I turned my body. The second was inside the helmet recording my face with a tiny fish-eye lens. I grabbed the tablet that was providing my Lander system readings, undocked it from the panel in front of the flight couch, and did a quick system query with the Habitat’s COM over a guest connection. That limited guest connection would be replaced with a full connection once I had time to pair my tablet and my suit’s COM system to the Habitats. That wouldn’t happen, though, until I was inside the Habitat, out of my Activity Suit and chillaxin’ on Mars! For now my suit was uplinked to Mar-Sat through the Lander. All systems showed operational, 3000 Kg of oxygen, 500 liters of water, full electrical charge in the batteries, and the solar collectors were operating nominally.

  I moved over to the airlock. I had put a bunch of personal stuff in there while transferring supplies when I was still in orbit. They were still securely attached to the anchor points provided. As I was about to shut the inner airlock door, I stopped and thought a moment about the U.S. Air Force briefing I had received prior to departure. I turned back into the cabin of the Lander, found the two elongated cases with no markings, and detached them from their straps. I put them in the airlock, and then shut the inner airlock door behind me.

  I checked to make sure both my suit cameras were recording and began a brief statement that was also being uplinked to Mar-Sat in live-time through the Landers COM array. In eighteen minutes and a titch, they would see it on Terra.

  “Hello Earth! This is Mike Lane reporting to you from the surface of Mars! My Lander safely touched down just over five minutes ago. I’m in the Lander airlock now, I’m ready to depressurize, and open the outer hatch.” I reached over and pressed my gloved hand against the button to cycle the airlock to a pressure equivalent to that outside the Lander. As the pumps whirred and sucked the atmosphere from the now cramped airlock, I continued. “I have to tell you that I’m humbled today. I stand on the shoulders of giants and I’m able to reach even further because of what they did. Yuri Gagarin, the first man into space, paved the way for all who followed him. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, well, they fired our imagination with Neil’s one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind. Today is going to be the follow-up, the sequel to what those brave men did. Today we are one step further into the Verse.”

  Pressure balancing was complete, and the hatch was ready to open. “In just a few moments I’m going to open the outer airlock hatch and take humanity’s first step on a planet other than Earth. I’ll be making that first step on the planet that has so often been the subject of science-fiction, speculation, poetry and prose. It’s no longer a dream though folks. With this first step, mankind will truly be an inter-planetary …”

  The airlock was filled with a flash of light so bright that my breath caught in my throat, and I closed my eyes reflexively. This was compounded at the exact same moment by the loudest sound I had ever heard, and the feeling of my body, my whole world, being catapulted and turned upside down. I screamed as I slammed into the rear of the airlock; or more precisely, the rear of the airlock rushing towards me slammed into my body. I blacked out as my head dangerously bounced around inside my helmet.

  Mission Control

  It was just after two in the morning in Sweden. There was a chill in the air, and large snowflakes gently fell through the night sky; the sticky kind of snowflakes that clung to everything. They clung to Carrie Oolsen’s tightly braided blond hair, as she ran into the Corporation’s night entrance, just down the hall from Mission Control proper. She had to wait for her babysitter to arrive at her home, a fifteen-minute drive from the Corporation’s complex, before the thirty-seven year old widowed mom of two could leave for work. She had been due in at midnight, and had wanted to get there even earlier. It was Descent Day after all; everyone was wound up and excited. That plan didn’t quite work when the babysitter got there late. A traffic mess had been created by a transport truck on a slippery curve in the road.

  The self-trained computer genius and video expert ran to her shared office to throw her coat and briefcase into the corner, she picked up her travel mug, stopped to fill it with rich black coffee, and then bolted for Mission Control. As she burst through the door, one of the media lackeys jumped in surprise, and sent an explosion of paperwork falling around him. Hans Gohs, the Flight Director and now one of the Mission Directors looked over at her, smiled and touched his nose. She smiled back in embarrassment, and headed to her workstation. Her skill, commitment, and dedication bought her leeway with Hans; but she still did not like taking advantage of that.

  The afternoon shift tech was still sitting there and wasn’t in a rush to leave. He gave up his seat for her, but grabbed another nearby chair and hunkered in beside her. Arno Lidstrom was as excited as Carrie was. He also thought she was kind of cute, in a frumpy way, so he didn’t mind the cramped seating. While he didn’t mind sharing the workstation with her, he had to keep reminding himself, she was on duty; it was time to let her do her job, and keep his hands to himself … in more ways than one. They had four UltraHi-Def monitors at their workstation, which had much clearer and crisper images than those that were being displayed on the large screens at the front of the room. They were probably the only two people in the room that were not watching the big screens, because their pictures were better. Tonight Carrie’s focus (and it would seem Arno’s as well) was to ensure continuity of video feed, and address any problems that came up with it. Be
cause this computer handled the image processing to the bigger screen, there was just over half a second lag time from what they saw, to when everyone else saw it.

  She could see the image of Mike Lane in the Lander. Slightly distorted by the curve of his helmets face plate, she could see his teeth were gritted, and he was focused on the instrumentation in front of him. The second screen was the downward camera on the outside of the Lander. The last two screens were images from Mar-Sat, one long range and one upclose on the descending Lander. The targeting systems kept the Lander in the centre of the screens all the way to touchdown.

  “Down angle camera please,” Hans Gohs’ voice came from across the room. Arno started to reach towards the console, but Carrie slapped his hand away with a smile. She made the adjustment and the down angle camera on the outside of the Lander now replaced Mike’s image with that of the Martian surface rushing up to meet the Lander. Unfortunately there was a fair amount of rocket engine flaring obscuring the view. Carrie looked over her shoulder and Hans shook his head. Too much flame and not enough pizzazz, she interpreted. She switched back to the feed arriving from Mike’s helmet camera, giving a point of view shot from the interior of the Lander. Wow, she thought to herself. Could he have crammed any more crap into that little thing? She then switched the long camera view from the satellite to appear on the big screen, replacing the boring view of the interior of the Lander.

  She saw the parachute canopies jettisoned on the big screen and turned her head slightly to focus on her smaller screens in front of her. Shortly after that, the second RAD assembly fired. After that assembly was depleted and jettisoned, she put the image from the outboard camera up on the big screen. There was a chorus of “ooos” from around the room. There was a clear shot of the Martian surface rushing towards the camera that lasted for moments before the flare of the final RAD assembly. She looked over her shoulder and Hans gave a slight nod.