A Mars Odyssey

by Michel Poulin

  ‘’An excellent idea! Mark that spot on your navigation map as the drone’s landing spot of choice. Hopefully, it will have enough altitude left at the end of its run to come back to that spot.’’

  ‘’Don’t forget that the drone has a small rocket motor that I can use to sustain or increase its flying altitude. As things are going now, I believe that our chances of landing the drone there are fairly good.’’

  ‘’Excellent! Can you start flying closer to the left, to get near the southern cliffs of the canyon?’’

  ‘’No problem, Doctor.’’

  Steering the drone towards the left, Peter slowly made it approach the southern cliffs of the center part of the Melas Chasma, until it flew parallel to them from a distance of a mere ten kilometers. By then, the pictures they were getting were of unprecedented detail and definition, making the scientists ecstatic.

  ‘’These images are superb!’’ exclaimed Yves Dorval, a Canadian geologist and prospector slated to be part of the Mars landing team. ‘’This is like reading an open book on the geological history of Mars.’’

  One of the other geologists, Thor Vaslung, suddenly raised his voice in excitement while pointing at a feature visible on his screen.

  ‘’I see the entrance of a cave or tunnel, about two-thirds down the slopes!’’

  ‘’I see it too!’’ said Steve Larkin, the senior geologist. ‘’It looks like the entrance of a lava tube.’’

  ‘’It definitely does look like a lava tube.’’ said Denisovich after examining the feature for a few seconds. ‘’It also opens up at the level of what is clearly a volcanic strata. From the field of hydrated soil at the feet of the cliff, under that opening, I would venture that water once circulated inside that lava tube, washing out all that volcanic dirt. Too bad that this tube is situated so high in the cliff. I would have loved to explore it. With luck, we will see more lava tube entrances, hopefully near or at ground level. Keep your eyes open, guys!’’

  The other scientists didn’t have to be told twice and glued themselves to their viewing screens, commenting each feature of interest between them as Peter Walsingham kept flying his drone westward. By now the drone was about to go lower than the nearby top of the cliffs and he was doing his best to minimize as much as possible its descent rate. In that he was greatly helped by the helium balloon attached to the drone’s parachute. If not for it, the drone would have hit the bottom of the canyon already. More excited comments shot up fifteen minutes later, as the drone was flying just below the top of the cliffs.

  ‘’I see the entrance of another possible lava tube. It is nearly at ground level, just above a cone of dirt formed by a landslide. Could we launch one of the mini-rovers now to explore that opening?’’

  ‘’Don’t forget that the drone carries only four mini-rovers, gentlemen.’’ cautioned Peter. ‘’Make sure that we use them wisely.’’

  ‘’This actually looks more than interesting enough to rate a mini-rover.’’ replied Denisovich, who was gleefully examining the cave opening now visible on a screen. ‘’You may launch a mini-rover now, Mister Walsingham.’’

  ‘’One mini-rover, coming up!’’ said cheerfully Peter before looking to his right at Frey Thorvalson, one of the two rover drivers slated to go down to the surface of Mars. ‘’Be ready to drive mini-rover number one once it will have landed, Frey.’’

  ‘’I am ready, Peter.’’ replied the big Icelandic technician.

  ‘’Alright, launching mini-rover number one now!’’

  A small, wheeled vehicle the size of an all terrain vehicle was soon dropped from the gliding drone, to have its fall nearly immediately braked by a large parachute. Being designed to be as light as possible, the mini-rover flew down at a moderate speed, its impact on the ground being further diminished by the last second firing of a set of small solid propellant rockets. The four oversized, low profile wheels and their independent suspensions easily absorbed the remaining downward velocity, with the parachute detaching itself from the mini-rover after touchdown. Frey Thorvalson then took control of the small robotic vehicle, scanning first around its landing point with the help of its swiveling camera head mounted atop a short mast, before making the mini-rover start rolling towards the wide cone of dirt under the lava tube’s opening. Having landed less than a kilometer from that opening, the mini-rover took only five minutes to get to the bottom of the landslide mound, while the reconnaissance drone continued gliding westward overhead. Driven expertly by the big Icelander, who had spent much of his life driving vehicles around the rough, denuded landscape of Iceland, the mini-rover slowly climbed the mound, which was fortunately free of large rocks on its slopes, arriving at the intersection with the vertical rock wall formed by the cliff. There, Frey was faced with a problem: the opening of the lava tube was about four meters above the top of the mound, forming an apparently insurmountable obstacle for the small robotic vehicle. However, the designers of the mini-rovers had planned for the need to possibly have to effect short jumps around and had incorporated to the vehicles a system of low thrust rocket thrusters with directional capability. The low gravity on Mars, which was only 37% that of Earth, had facilitated the design of those thrusters. Still, those thrusters had fuel for only a few seconds, something Thorvalson was well aware off. Calculating carefully his jump, Frey then lit up the thrusters of the mini-rover to half power, making the vehicle rise at once at the vertical. Just before getting level with the opening, he oriented the thrusters to create a horizontal acceleration. The moment that the mini-rover was inside the lava tube, he cut the thrusters, saving the leftover fuel for later.

  ‘’I’m inside the lava tube! I am now going to plant a radio transmitter relay box near the entrance and will start winding out its fiber optics cable, plus will switch to low light cameras and headlights.’’

  ‘’Great job, Mister Thorvalson!’’ said Denisovich, pleased. ‘’Now, let’s see what we will find inside that lava tube. Steve, you concentrate on the view from our mini-rover while I keep watching around the drone.’’

  ‘’Got it! You may roll, Frey.’’

  Frey didn’t have to be told twice and made his mini-rover roll slowly forward inside the lava tube, which had an internal diameter of at least forty meters.

  ‘’This lava tube could easily house the prefabricated modules of our fixed base and will certainly protect it from the radiations showering Mars’ surface. The one thing left that we need would be water.’’

  ‘’How much radiation is the mini-rover detecting now, Frey?’’ asked Jason Terlecki, whose main job would be to build a fixed base on the surface. One glance at his instruments made the Icelander smile.

  ‘’In contrast with when the mini-rover was still in the open, it now can barely detect any radiation. The counter registers a mere 0.0009 milligrays per hour and it is still close to the entrance.’’

  ‘’That’s to my liking.’’

  Larkin and Terlecki kept their eyes glued to their viewing screens as Thorvalson made the mini-rover advance further inside the tunnel. As it went deeper in the lava tube, the diameter decreased very slowly but it was still over 34 meter wide after the vehicle had rolled a good hundred meters inside the dark tunnel. After rolling for about 230 meters, Frey stopped his mini-rover as his vehicle’s cameras suddenly saw a dramatic increase in the tunnel diameter. Switching to white light headlamps, which had more range and power than the infrared lights, he and the two specialists contemplated the image of a vast underground rotunda, in which walls they could see the openings of two other lava tubes, respectively to the right and ahead.

  ‘’My god! A lava chamber! It must have a diameter of at least 150 meters and a maximum height of sixty meters.’’ said Terlecki. ‘’It would be a perfect place to build our base.’’

  ‘’Yes, but we still need to find some water.’’ Larkin reminded him. ‘’Frey, go take the larger tunnel, the one to the right of the rover.’’

  �
�’On the way!’’

  Piloted by the Icelander, the mini-rover started rolling on the dusty surface of the rotunda’s floor, heading towards the larger lava tube. At one point, as he steered to avoid a large rock that had apparently fallen from the ceiling, his rover made a sideways motion, as if it had slid on a slippery floor.

  ‘’What the…? The rover slipped on something!’’

  Braking his rover made it slide again, this time forward. Now truly mystified, he decided to try something and put his rover in high gear, then went for maximum acceleration for a second. The result left him stunned.

  ‘’The wheels: they spun on the spot! It’s as if…’’

  Making the camera head of the rover look down, he then made the vehicle turn around, so that he could look at the tracks left in the dirt by its wheels. A white, shiny surface reflected at once the light from the headlamps, making Frey’s heart skip a beat.

  ‘’ICE! THE ROVER SLIPPED ON ICE!’’

  His excited shout immediately attracted all the scientists present to the screens showing the images from the mini-rover. Roman Denisovich felt blood rush to his brain when he saw that Thorvalson was right.

  ‘’It does look like ice! The question is now: how deep is that ice crust? Could there be another lava tube below this lava chamber, a tube filled with ancient water? Frey, power the seismic radar of your mini-rover.’’

  All eyes went to one of the side screens of Thorvalson’s station, on which the radar picture was due to show up.

  ‘’Switching the radar now.’’

  Everyone in the compartment held their breath as the first radar wave travelled downward from the mini-rover. More than one of the geologists felt exhilaration on seeing the radar return picture now on the screen.

  ‘’It’s nearly bottomless!’’ exclaimed Sergei Krulov, one the geologists and prospectors due to land on Mars. ‘’The rover is sitting on top of a vertical lava tube filled with ice.’’

  ‘’Not all ice!’’ replied Denisovich while pointing at a barely visible change in the picture some twenty meters under the rover. ‘’The ice seems to become liquid around that level. This is truly a sensational find. Maybe that water and ice-filled lava tube is going down all the way to a deep aquifer layer, in which case we just found more than enough water for our base, or even for a colony. Maybe the other tunnels will also lead to ice. Mister Thorvalson, get into that tunnel you were heading for when you slipped.’’

  ‘’With pleasure, Doctor.’’

  As Denisovich excitedly called up Janet Larsson to give her the good news, Frey piloted his mini-rover into the right-side tunnel, which was about as wide as the one that led outside. Still dispensing a thin fiber optics cable behind it, the vehicle started following a gentle downward slope, surrounded by walls made of dark volcanic rock. The tunnel proved to be mostly straight, while the downward slope became gradually more severe, to the point where Frey started worrying about having enough traction to climb back up. He then decided to use another special feature of the rover.

  ‘’I am going to plant a peg now, so that I can winch my way back up afterwards.’’

  ‘’How much cable length does your winch has?’’ asked at once Terlecki.

  ‘’A hundred meters. Once at the end of it, I will have no choice but to come back up: the fuel cell of the rover will be good for another hour at the most before it will need to electrolyze its waste water back into hydrogen and oxygen. The rover thus must be back at the entrance before that, so that its solar panels can supplement its isotopic generator.’’

  ‘’Understood!’’

  Pressing a button, Frey made the mini-rover fire down a thin steel peg attached to a thin cable spun around a winch drum. The peg planted itself solidly in the ground, allowing Frey to resume the rover’s advance with more confidence. However, to his disappointment and that of Jason Terlecki, the rover came at the end of its winch cable without finding anything than more of the dark tunnel.

  ‘’Damn! I wish we could have gone all the way down to whatever is there at the bottom.’’

  ‘’Don’t feel too bad, Frey.’’ said Jason while patting his shoulder. ‘’Your rover already found plenty and we still have another tunnel to explore.’’

  ‘’You’re right! I’m going to winch my way back up, so that we could go back to the rotunda and go inside that second tunnel.’’

  All the while, Peter Walsingham and the scientists in the compartment were not idle, as the reconnaissance drone continued its glide path westward, scanning the floor of the canyon and the cliffs on both sides as it went. They saw the openings of a few more lava tubes along the southern cliffs but, unfortunately, all of them were situated at least a few hundred meters above the canyon floor, making them inaccessible to the rovers of the drone. Then came the time for the drone to turn around to fly eastward while skirting the northern cliffs of the Melas Chasma. What the scientists saw of the northern cliffs at first was quite similar to the southern cliffs. That changed all of a sudden as the drone was approximately 150 kilometers west of the junction of the Melas Chasma with the Melas Labes, a region of landslides connecting with the tormented terrain of the Candor Chaos region. The scientists were in fact already hopeful, as the drone was level with a part of the canyon where a number of old river beds connected with it. Geologist Tim Garland was the first to exclaim himself while pointing at his viewing screen.

  ‘’I see a lava tube opening right under the extremity of that surface top dried river bed: it is level with the surface of the floor of the canyon, thus will be accessible to our rovers.’’

  ‘’Excellent!’’ said a smiling Denisovich. ‘’Mister Walsingham, get ready to launch a second mini-rover. Mister Olunov will drive it once on the surface.’’

  ‘’Wait! I see a second opening at the base of the cliff under the river bed.’’ nearly shouted Sergei Krulov. ‘’And there’s a third one nearby.’’

  ‘’My god! This sounds like Christmas gift giving. Mister Walsingham, launch rover number two now.’’

  ‘’Launching Rover Two now! Be ready to drive it, Sergei.’’

  ‘’You’re kidding? I’ve been waiting just for that for the last two hours.’’ replied the Russian technician, his hands already on the controls of the rover.

  A second mini-rover was then ejected from the drone, with its parachute deploying nearly at once. The sighting of more lava tube openings at ground or near ground level then prompted Denisovich into ordering the launch of a third rover, with Yves Dorval then assigned to drive it. The next hour went by like a flash, with the scientists and technicians either piloting rovers or watching the views from both the drone and the three deployed rovers. If anything, mini-rovers number two and three ended up being at least as successful as mini-rover number one in finding features of high interest. In fact, by the time that the reconnaissance drone finally landed in the middle of the Melas Chasma, at its deepest point, mini-rovers two and three had found out that the multiple lava tube openings that they entered proved to be part of an elaborate system of interconnected tunnels, empty lava chambers and deep vertical lava wells, many of the later filled with water ice covered by a relatively thin layer of dust. It was well after suppertime, as night descended on the region of the Melas Chasma, when an ecstatic Roman Denisovich told his tired but happy and proud team to take a break and go eat.

  ‘’Well, I believe that we just found the perfect site for our future Mars Base One, guys. These cave complexes at the foot of the northern cliffs will provide us plenty of safe space to protect our habitat modules from space radiations, on top of having more than enough water to support a full-fledged colony. I will thus counsel our commander to designate that area as the chosen landing spot for our Mars Lander. Now, go eat and rest: you amply deserved it.’’

  CHAPTER 8 – A FRUSTRATING DELAY

  08:04 (GMT)

  Thursday, February 25, 2044

  Northwest section of the Melas Chasma<
br />
  Valles Marineris, Mars

  The large, conical ship, floating down under its huge directional parachute topped by a helium balloon, further slowed down its descent by firing up briefly its main rocket engine as it was only twenty meters above the dirt floor of the Martian canyon, landing softly on its multiple landing wheels and bouncing slightly once before coming to a rest on the Martian dirt. The ship, with a maximum width at its base of 26 meters and a height of 34 meters, soon started to roll towards a group of lava tube openings at the base of the northern cliffs of the canyon, some seventeen kilometers away. The ten wheels of the ship, far from simply supporting the ship, were also motorized, each of them incorporating an electric drive motor connected to the small nuclear reactor plant of the ship. Motoring along at fifteen kilometers per hour, the ship arrived after 75 minutes beside the group of lava tube openings, then parked itself as close as possible to the foot of the ten kilometer-high cliff wall, in order to enjoy as much radiation protection as possible from the rocky wall, which in effect cut down by half the amount of radiation showering this part of the surface of Mars.

  Up in orbit, aboard the H.S.S. FRIENDSHIP, the team led by Doctor Roman Denisovich exchanged high fives and handshakes inside the remote control center of the ship, with Denisovich happily patting the shoulder of Denise Wattling, who had remotely piloted the Mars Cargo Lander Number One down into the Melas Chasma canyon.

  ‘’That was some really nice piloting on your part, Denise: we could barely have asked for a more precise landing near our intended future base location.’’

  ‘’Well, you really should praise the engineers who designed our landers, Roman. They conceived a truly ingenious and effective design. This combination of parachute, helium balloon and retro-rocket, plus the motorized landing wheels, make it easy to reach our intended landing point. So, when do we launch our three other cargo ships?’’