Seeds
Page 2
The team has been out on several explorations but this
is the furthest they have gone and great care in preparation and packing is
essential for survival. Even though there is a emergency vehicle on stand by in
case of an emergency and there is a rocket that can carry emergency supplies to
any place on the moon, it is still dangerous to travel so far from base.
John and Sheila man the first vehicle and Gordon
and Jim follow close behind. Each vehicle contains a large supply of water for
drinking and use in the solar powered R/E system. (Rapid/Electrolysis). Even
though each member has their own recycling system to take the oxygen out of the
CO-2 exhaled, the Hydrogen is burned for heat in the vehicle when on dark
missions and the extra oxygen is stored. The Hydrogen heater that burns the
hydrogen with the stored oxygen produces water. H2O that is recycled back to the
R/E unit. So very little is lost. Batteries
are still used in addition and as a short term back up for life support and
radio equipment.
The new batteries work well and are charged when the sun
it shining, which should be full time on this mission and most of the long
distance travel is possible during sun light as they have power to waste. Dark
time travel is kept to the most economical speed and distance. So only short
missions are conducted in the dark cycle.
The new batteries work well and are continuously
charged by the solar panels, which allows much faster travel during sun light as
they have power to waste. That is
why this mission was planned for the daytime only, due to how far it is from
base.
The new people on the moon have to adjust to the
unusual Day/Night of the Moon so they use a 24-hour day like on Earth. We
stopped and set up a camp with one Pressurized tent for all four of us. An
“Air Lock” inflates so one person can get into the air lock, then the air
lock is evacuated of air which is pumped back into the tent, thus little to no
air is lost each time someone leaves the tent. A second tent is carried but only
as a back up incase of damage. The vehicles can also be used as a tent too, as
they can be pumped full of air or evacuated to get in and out.
They still ware their suits in the vehicle because of the danger of
damage while driving over the rough terrain.
“Rough terrain” is putting it mildly as we
have to navigate a mountain range to get to K-43. Since there is no atmosphere
and thus no rain, there are no riverbeds to get through the terrain. So it is
slow going picking our way through rocks and at times back tracking to find a
different rout.
It was a relief to finally crest a hill and see
flat ground ahead and from our recon photos from the satellite we knew our
target area was just over the horizon. “Over the horizon” is not as far as
it is on Earth due to the smaller Moon.
The Moon is laid out in a grid just like on Earth
with Longitude and Latitudes, however each block on this grid is labeled with a
code. K-43 is our target area. With
satellites over head we have a GPS system just like on Earth so we always know
where we are and with additional photomaps we have no trouble with locations.
As soon as we reached the edge of K-43 we set up
our camp. Even though we are on the side of the Moon that never faces the Earth
we have radio communication with Earth by bouncing the signal off of several
Moon satellites. Our day light and
night time is very long on the Moon, due to the time it takes the Moon to circle
the Earth. So our daylight is plotted on a calendar rather then a clock. Since
we are on the far side of the Moon we never see the Earth and thus the Earth
never comes between the Sun and us. But there is no “Earth Light” to
brighten up the dark time.
This exploration of K-43 is timed to take advantage of
the continuous daylight. We must finish the trip in time to return to base
before dark, as it would be dangerous to try to navigate through the rocks in
the dark. Plus it requires a lot of power to keep lights on.
We laid K-43 out into a smaller grid system so we can
keep track of where on K-43 we locate the metal, spotted by the satellite scan.
We set our solar panels up over our vehicles and tents because heat is now the
problem not cold. We even have flexible solar panels on our suits and helmets to
run the AC system in each suit.
The terrain was flat, so it was going to be an easy task
to scan the whole K-43 grid. Then go back to each small grid area to physically
dig samples of the surface up to take back to the lab for analysis. Even though
we do have small robotic vehicles that can do all of this and we do use them on
exploration near the base, K-43 was too large and too far away.
We used both vehicles to run the surface scan, which
only took three days Earth time. When we finished we Looked at the data on our
table viewer of the results and got a disappointment. All of the metal were
fragments of what looked like a meteorite that had struck the Moon in an adverse
angle and shattered into many pieces and spread out in a fan shaped pattern and
not the mineral deposits we had hopped for. We would normally just return to
base and consider this mission closed except the fragments were very dense in
material so we decided to dig some of them up to see what they were made of.
We don’t have to stop the vehicle and get out and dig
them up when they are not too deep as these were. The vehicles have a scooping
device on the bottom so all we had to do was stop over each fragment and the
vehicle does the rest.
After gathering up many of the larger fragments, we returned to our tent to inspect them.