“When was the last time he worked on the trailer?” Venkat asked.
“Not for a while. Why doesn’t he write us notes more often?”
Venkat shrugged. “He’s busy. He works most of the daylight hours, and arranging rocks to spell a message takes time and energy.”
“So…” Mindy said. “Why’d you come here in person? We could have done all this over email.”
“Actually, I came to talk to you,” he said. “There’s going to be a change in your responsibilities. From now on, instead of managing the satellites around Mars, your sole responsibility is watching Mark Watney.”
“What?” Mindy said. “What about course corrections and alignment?”
“We’ll assign that to other people,” Venkat said. “From now on, your only focus is examining imagery of Ares 3.”
“That’s a demotion,” Mindy said. “I’m an orbital engineer, and you’re turning me in to a glorified Peeping Tom.”
“It’s short-term,” Venkat said. “And we’ll make it up to you. Thing is, you’ve been doing it for months and you’re an expert at identifying elements of Ares 3 from satellite pics. We don’t have anyone else who can do that.”
“Why is this suddenly so important?”
“He’s running out of time,” Venkat said. “We don’t know how far along he is on the rover modifications. But we do know he’s on only got 16 sols to get them done. We need to know exactly what he’s doing. I’ve got media outlets and senators asking for his status all the time. The President even called me a couple of times.
“But seeing his status doesn’t help,” Mindy said. “It’s not like we can do anything about it if he falls behind. This is a pointless task.”
“How long have you worked for the government?” Venkat sighed.
The time has come to test this shit out.
This presents a problem. Unlike my Pathfinder trip, I have to take vital life support elements out of the Hab. When you take the Atmospheric Regulator and Oxygenator out of the Hab, you’re left with… a tent. A big round tent that can’t support life.
It’s not as risky as it seems. As always, the dangerous part about life support is managing carbon dioxide. When the air gets to 1% CO2, you start getting symptoms of poisoning. So I need to keep it below that.
The Hab’s internal volume is about 120,000L. Breathing normally, it would take me over two days to bring the CO2 level up to 1% (and I wouldn’t even dent in the O2 level). So it’s safe to move the Regulator and Oxygenator over for a while.
Both are way too big to fit through the trailer airlock. Lucky for me, they came to Mars with “some assembly required”. They were too big to send whole, so they’re easy to dismantle.
Over several trips, I took all their chunks to the trailer. I brought each chunk in through the airlock, one at a time. It was a pain in the ass reassembling them inside, let me tell you. There’s barely enough room for all the shit it’s got to hold. There wasn’t much left for our intrepid hero.
Then I got the AREC. It sat outside the Hab like an AC unit might on Earth. In a way, that’s what it was. I hauled it over to the trailer and lashed it to the shelf I’d made for it. Then I hooked it up to the feed lines that led through the “balloon” to the inside of the trailer’s pressure vessel.
The Regulator needs to send air to the AREC then the return air needs to bubble through the heat reservoir. And, it needs a pressure tank to dump the CO2 it pulls from the air.
When gutting the trailer to make room, I left one tank in place for this. It’s supposed to hold oxygen, but a tank’s a tank. Thank God all the air lines and valves are standardized across the mission. That’s no mistake. It’s a deliberate decision for maintenance purposes. We could fix things in the field easier that way.
Once everything assembled, I hooked them in to the trailer’s power and watched them power up. I ran both through full diagnostics to confirm they were working correctly. Then I shut down the Oxygenator. Remember, I’ll only use it one sol out of every 5.
I moved to the rover, which means I had to do an annoying 10-meter EVA. From there I monitored the life support situation. It’s worth noting that I can’t monitor the actual support equipment from the rover (it’s all in the trailer), but the rover can tell me all about the air. Oxygen, CO2, temperature, humidity, etc. Everything seemed ok.
Getting back in to the EVA suit, I released a canister of CO2 in to the rover’s air. I watched the rover computer have a shit-fit when it saw the CO2 spike to lethal levels. Then, over time, the levels dropped to normal. The regulator was doing its job. Good boy!
I left the equipment running when I returned to the Hab. It’ll be on its own all night and I’ll check it in the morning. It’s not a true test, because I’m not there to breathe up the oxygen and make CO2, but one step at a time.
Last night was weird. I knew
But I did wake up, and the main computer showed the slight rise in CO2 I had predicted. Looks like I live another Sol.
“Live Another Sol” would be an awesome name for a James Bond movie.
I checked up on the rover. Everything was fine. If I don’t drive it, a single charge of the batteries could keep the regulator going for over a month (with the heater off). It’s a pretty good safety margin to have. If all hell breaks loose on my trip I’ll have time to fix things. I’d be limited by oxygen consumption rather than CO2 removal, and I have plenty of oxygen.
I decided it was a good time to test the bedroom.
I got in the rover, and attached the bedroom to the outer airlock door from the inside. Like I mentioned before, this is the only way to do it. Then I turned it loose on an unsuspecting Mars.
As intended, the pressure from the rover blasted the canvas outward and inflated it. After that, chaos. The sudden pressure popped the bedroom like a balloon. It quickly deflated, leaving both itself and the rover devoid of air. I was wearing my EVA suit at the time; I’m not a fucking idiot. So I get to…
Live Another Sol! (Starring Mark Watney as … probably Q. I’m no James Bond.)
I dragged the popped bedroom in to the Hab and gave it a good going-over. It failed at the seam where the wall met the ceiling. Makes sense. It’s a right-angle in a pressure vessel. Physics hates that sort of thing.
First, I patched it up, then I cut strips of spare canvas to place over the seam. Now it has double-thickness and double sealing resin all around. Maybe that’ll be enough. At this point, I’m kind of guessing. My amazing botany skills aren’t much use for this.
I’ll test it again tomorrow.
I’m out of caffeine pills. No more Martian Coffee for me.
So it took a little longer for me to wake up this morning, and I spent most of the day with a headache. One nice thing about living in a multi-billion dollar mansion on Mars: Access to pure oxygen. For some reason, a high concentration of O2 will kill most headaches. Don’t know why. Don’t care. The important thing is I don’t have to suffer.
I tested out the bedroom again. I used the same process as yesterday. This time it held. So is that good? I don’t know. That’s the shitty part of failure analysis. If the bedroom fails while I’m sleeping in it, I’ll die. How long will it last?
Hopefully, if it developed a leak, it’d be slow enough that I could react. But you never know.
After a few minutes standing around in my EVA suit, I decided to make better use of my time. I may not be able to leave while the bedroom is attached to the airlock, but I can go in to the rover and close the door.
Once I did that, I took off the uncomfortable EVA suit. The bedroom was on the other side of the airlock door, still fully pressurized. So I’m still running my test, but I don’t have to wear the EVA suit.
I wanted a good long test (I arbitrarily picked 8 hours) so I was trapped in the rover until then.
I spent my time planning the trip. There wasn’t much to add to what I already knew. I’ll bee-line to Mawrth Vallis, then follow it until it ends. It’ll take me on a zig-zag route, but mostly toward Schiaparelli.
