MISSION LOG – SOL 101
Good morning, log! Today is a busy day for me, because I’m the only one in the Hab with a working space suit! Dragonfly says the suits are still curing after yesterday’s patching work, so none of the pony crew is going outside today. So, in addition to brushing off the solar panels, I get to do a lot of driving today!
Today’s chores: dump the RTG back in its hole; make a circuit of the weather stations and see which ones can be brought back online; go to the farm and check on things there; and bring back some quartz for Fireball, because he’s running low.
Quite a shopping list I have. Eggs, butter, plutonium, quartz.
Luckily I don’t have to worry about NASA giving me new orders today. Pathfinder is still working through the upload backlog, thanks to the photo session getting pushed back while the ponies had their makeover at Spa Watney. (I don’t blame them. I am, after all, the most popular and exclusive spa host on the whole planet.) So until the upload is completed I’m off NASA’s leash.
I gotta say, it feels nice. There’s a world of difference (see what I did there?) between involuntarily cut off from communications and voluntarily cut off. Earth is still there if I want or need them, but for the time being they can’t touch me for some stupid questions about alien rhizomes or percentages of light converted to heat when transmitted through a magic crystal.
Just got around to reading Dr. Shields’ email. Basically she says she told Venkat off when she found out he ignored her advice. She’s put in for time on the chat to talk with Dragonfly to find out her views on doctor-client privilege and trust issues. And she says that if Venkat or anybody else, even Teddy Sanders, tries this shit again, she’ll resign, call a press conference, and blow the whistle so hard I’ll be able to hear it here without Pathfinder.
Irene Shields might be a head-shrink, but she’s all right.
“Watney’s a dead man.”
The words hit Venkat’s ears at the same time a large pile of printouts, neatly held together by a pair of alligator clips, thudded onto his desk. The bearer of this ill tidings, Sue Douglass, was the head of JSC’s Astromaterials Research labs, which among other things included planetary geology. She was the one who determined which research labs did or didn’t get the priceless mineral samples from Ares I and II, and who would do the same for the quick-stow samples from Ares III’s truncated mission.
“Good morning, Sue,” Venkat replied pleasantly. “Good to see you’re on time for your appointment, which I don't remember you making. I trust my secretary made you comfortable while you waited?”
“I said, Watney is a dead man,” Sue replied. “And so are those adorable colorful aliens who are on the front pages of every paper in the world today.”
“I heard you,” Venkat said patiently. “Would you mind explaining why?”
Sue picked her massive report back up, flipped through several pages, and held it open for Venkat to view. It was a photograph of Watney’s cave farm taken from just inside the impossibly installed alien airlock. What appeared to be half the glittering crystals in the ceiling glowed with a bright light, fully illuminating the dark green plants in elongated rows on the dirt below. More crystals coated the walls, with several running completely from floor to ceiling at odd angles- including one that plunged right into the heart of the cultivated area.
“It’s an impressive sight,” Venkat admitted. “So?”
“So?” Sue asked sarcastically. “So it’s a lava tube. It has to be. It’s not even the largest or longest lava tube we’ve spotted on Mars, though how it got attached to a volcano that small will make somebody’s doctoral thesis someday. Obviously it was flooded with water for hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of years. Hot, mineral-rich water, to be exact. And those minerals deposited in all the vugs left behind when the first lava flows cooled, first forming a raw quartz overlay, then the crystals we’re seeing here.”
“If you say so,” Venkat shrugged. “I’m physics, not geology.”
“You’re the top Mars man in NASA,” Sue replied. “Which means you know why we knew lava tubes existed on Mars before now.”
“Remind me.”
“Because we’ve seen them. From orbit.” Sue flipped four pages in the report, then jabbed a finger down at a photo of Tharsis taken by a satellite. “And the reason we can see them from orbit is that they collapsed. Lava tubes always collapse, Venkat. They’re infamous for it. The material is weak and brittle and porous as all hell. That’s how you get geodes in them in the first place.”
Venkat grabbed the report and began flipping through the pages at random. “Are you telling me the roof is going to come in on Mark’s farm?” he asked.
“Nooooooo, no,” Sue said. “That would be too easy. That would be what might happen if the cave had been left alone.” She took the report back from Venkat and flipped to the appropriate page, a page full of equations Venkat recognized. “But that cave is full of one full atmosphere of air pressure. And according to Watney’s log, it’s only definitely airtight at the airlock end and at the far end- where the old tube meets what I’d guess it its old magma chamber.
“So do the math with me, Venkat. We know the material making up the cave walls is porous. The only reason we can guess for there not being any leaks right now is a layer of permafrost and compacted regolith on top of the cave. But the more that system heats up, the more unstable those layers will become. Eventually there will be a leak. And you know what happens then?”
“No. What?”
“The Hab airlock happens, that’s what!” Sue jabbed a finger at the equations again. “Except this time it’s at least fifty times as much air and a much tinier hole… at first.” She turned the page to more equations. “The air will leave through the initial breach at the speed of sound- three hundred sixty meters per second at least, maybe faster. The force of the air will rapidly erode the sides of the breach, causing cracks, faults, and blowouts.
“And then, once the air pressure on both sides is equalized, whatever’s left around the breach will be unsupported by the thick cushion of air it had before. The faults will continue to propagate, and the ceiling will cave in, probably in huge chunks.
“In short,” Sue said, closing the report and slapping it onto Venkat’s desk, “the cave will first blow out, and then cave in. And incidentally, anyone inside at the time will be killed by tornado-scale winds, decompression, or falling rock. Have your pick!” She took a breath, sighed, and added, “And even if they all live, there is absolutely no way they could ever repair the farm.There wouldn’t be a hole in the roof, Venkat. There would just be. No. Roof.”
Venkat nodded. “All right, I believe you,” he said. “But the two questions I have are: what can we do about it, and how long do they have before it happens?”
Sue shrugged. “It could happen tomorrow,” she said. “Or it could happen after Ares 3B arrives. We don’t know enough about the composition of the soil above the cave, or for that matter in and below the cave. We have Watney’s analysis,” she said, nudging the report, “but he geared that analysis towards the immediate task of growing crops in what he found.”
“Do you want him to take new samples?”
“Hell, no!” Sue shouted. “The soil in the cave’s contaminated now, and the last thing in the world we want now is anything disturbing the soil on top of the cave. No,” she said. “What we want, ideally, is for that alien to do whatever she did to seal the ends of the cave for the entire cave. Make the geode absolutely airtight. Do that, and the risk of blowout is eliminated so long as they don’t crack the outer layer of quartz in their mining operations.”
Venkat blinked. “Mining operations?” he asked.
Sue rolled her eyes. “Venkat, how much sleep have you been getting?” she asked. “And have you been reading your own chat logs?”
“Not enough,” Venkat admitted. “What did I miss?”
“God knows,” Sue said with feeling, “but in this case you missed two things. The aliens use gemstones and crystals like quartz for their technology. And the dragon eats gems. Without the quartz crystals he has no food supply at all.”
“Okay,” Venkat said, making some notes on a scratch pad. “I’ll talk to Mark about it tomorrow and see if it’s feasible. What about interim precautions?”
“If possible, lower the air pressure to ten PSI inside the cave,” Sue said. “That’s equivalent to the air pressure in La Paz, Bolivia, and they can grow crops there. And monitor the temperature and keep it as low as cultivation will permit. The lower the temperature and the less the pressure differential between inside and outside the cave, the more time we have before the system literally collapses. Also, tell them to stay the hell away from any of the crystals that go completely across the geode. Up and down, side to side, whatever, leave them the hell alone.
“And above all, tell them to be gentle when cutting crystals off the walls. Don’t bend, push, twist, whatever. Straight cut or nothing. Shear forces on the outer walls of the geode are the worst thing that could happen to that setup.”
“Okay,” Venkat nodded. “Can we test any of this in the lab?”
Sue nodded, “I have some models we can put in the partial-pressure chamber and simulate, yes. We’ve already done computer models, but they’re based on incomplete data.”
“Get a proposal on my desk by tomorrow morning,” Venkat said. “You’ll have funding no later than the end of next week, so start lining up your personnel and materials needs now.” He tapped Sue’s report and added, “Also forward this to Director Sanders and email a copy to Commander Lewis on Hermes. Teddy needs to know, and Lewis was the geology specialist for Ares III. She might have some input on this.”
“Right.” Sue nodded, and then, having said her piece, she turned to leave.
“Wait a moment,” Venkat said. “Wouldn’t you be interested to know what I’ve been reading, that has me forgetting Mars chat logs and other reports?”
He swiveled his computer screen so that Sue could see it. The title of the document showing read: INTRODUCTION TO MAGIC THEORY AND ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL LAWS – STARLIGHT GLIMMER, ASTRONAUT.
“You would not believe,” Venkat said, unable to keep the hunger out of his voice, “how eager I am to make sense of this. And I have several thousand scientists from every branch of NASA except possibly yours demanding the chance to do so.
“And they all want access yesterday.” Venkat sighed. “I’m going to chat with Starlight tomorrow, so this is my homework. I need to know enough,” he said, tapping the screen, “to get to the point where my questions rise to the level of stupid.”
Yay!
Boo!
Crud it's going to happen to mark isn't it.
To quote Han Solo ..
I got a bad feeling about this...
8771096
Mark would fit in just fine in Ponyville, they face life or death situations every year
Great chapter--always glad to see new problems emerge that make complete sense.
Gonna have to wait to see the new farm explode, but hopefully not before the first cherry harvest comes in.
Keep up the great work!
8771100
Luke Skywalker actually said it first in the original film.
Heh such a tease.
I had actually realized the permafrost melting and breaking the seal from how warm they were getting the cave would be a problem the moment I heard that they were actually getting the temperature above freezing throughout the cave.
That the geologists recognized it before it actually happened though means they should be able to fix it. I mean they can have Starlight fuse the rocks, or failing that being sufficient they can have Dragonfly coat the roof in goo. I was expecting that no one would realize this in advance and the roof would blow out.
Venkat gets to read a primer on an entirely unknown branch of science. He should be excited beyond all reason.
8771123
Mark Hamill, on the Falcon, while escaping the Empire from Tatooine. He says it to no one in particular but Han replies that he has some special maneuvers or whatnot. But that's what starts it all.
I love the final sentence of the chapter, great chapter over all, but that final sentence had me laughing.
8771101
Every year? Hell ponyville faces huge problems like that practically every other DAY that town is a thousand times crazier than the infamous(fictional) town of gravity falls!
8771150
Meh, it's just Tuesday.
I wonder if NASA is going to build a Sparkle Drive rescue or resupply ship.
8771165
probably cant make the crystals magical.
8771150
Death to one-eyed, top-hat-wearing dream demons!
They can fix this. It will probably take all of the magic charge on the bateries but I am sure it can be done.
Starlight mentioned how force field spells depend on ambient magic and how there was only ambient magic on Mars around life. Maybe now that the crops are growing she can have cast a weak one on the cave to reinforce it?
Science is a cruel mistress. Good thing we have magic on our side. Also bug-pony goo, aka magical duck tape.
It's a very interesting feeling when your goal is to become educated enough to be considered "dim."
So, one standard solution for porous thing that needs to not leak is to paint an appropriate goop over it. The goop spreads over the surface, and wherever there are leaks it gets sucked in and clogs them, or with other goops the whole thing cures to a solid. My own experiences are mainly with Vacseal, which has some silicone precursor in solution xylene/toluene, and it's sort of runny. It would spread thinly enough that you wouldn't need much of it, but because it's runny, it doesn't handle pores above a certain annoyingly small size.
If Dragonfly could make something specialized to the job, the question would be whether she could make enough of it. 25 um = .001" thick coating times 100 m2 is already 2.5 L, and that's a pretty thin coating, but not unimaginable for an human expert industrial goop manufacturer. Dragonfly might be up to it, it's hard to guess.
"through the upload background, thanks"
"through the upload backlog, thanks"?
So the cave is Life, encapsulated by Death.
Less than one bar of pressure difference wouldn't cause massive supersonic explosive force.
If it leaks, they patch the hole, done.
Some spacecraft and the ISS have had leaks. They fixed it. They didn't immediately explode and die.
8771239 The main two difficulties are that most of the surface to be covered is in the direction of up, and that virtually all of it is covered by crystals of varying size but generally favoring "bloody huge".
8771279 And Airlock 1 also had the same leak and didn't explode. That's because metal is a lot more durable than regolith. The escaping air had only a very tiny hole in those cases, and the hole was in a material highly resistant to erosion by escaping air. The hole remained tiny.
If the cave leaks, the hole is not going to remain tiny very long at all.
8771165
While they could theoretically build it if they had the plans, it remains to be seen whether they could collect and harness any of the ambient magic lazing about Earth. Without that, they've got a car with no gasoline. Starlight's magic batteries seem to imply that they could, if they know what they're doing.
Potential for a NASA rescue mission arriving well before Ares 3B ever could? Interesting.
8771239
another large difficulty...raw material to make said goo comes directly from their food supplies...Dragonfly cannot produce anything without first giving something in return. 'to obtain, something of equal value must be lost.' even Changelings r bound by alchemy's first law of Equivalent Exchange
8771152
Maybe Mark will just have a friendship problem, and it’ll all be solved in half an hour?
8771281
That's both harder and easier. The crystals themselves are gas-tight, so that's less surface area that needs to be covered. Harder to apply whatever goop because you have to use a smaller brush to get between the crystals but it's not clear that that's enough to stop a determined painter, as opposed to frustrating them.
Looking for an easy way to do it with absolutely minimal resources, I might try to wet the surface to be sealed with water, and then use an oily mixture that could spread across it just like an oil slick. It would be kept from infiltrating by the water and then it could cure in place, no matter the viscosity. The point of the trick is to afford a consistent, thin, easily-applied coating.
Actually, wetting the exposed surfaces might do quite a bit to reduce the leak rate on its own. Depends on the structure of the porosity. But it seems like water-filled porous rock, in general, passes gas a lot more slowly than if the gas doesn't have to dissolve in water first. And they do have unlimited water. Might even work indefinitely, especially if the temperature is low. It really depends how mobile the water would be within the rock. Too much running water could conceivably cause erosion, but if it mostly stays put it would be more like wetting a sand castle to make it stronger. Hydrology is witchcraft.
8771308
I don't know if I'm proposing something workable, but if they had to choose between however many days' worth of magic battery charge and enough foodpacks for Dragonfly to make ~10 L of fancy sealing goop, they might go with the goop. The magic cost would have to be really steep, or there would have to be other complications, I think, to make goop sealing preferable to magic sealing, but magic sealing isn't strictly their only option.
Well then. At least they'll probably have a fair bit of charge on the batteries for the cave patch. Seeing as Starlight hasn't been using them for much with her being bed ridden. Still, with Mark's luck it'll go off while Pathfinder is still sending stuff and he doesn't even know that the cave is a problem.
I'm interested in knowing what the general public/media's reaction is to all this.
Ya know... I'm beginning to think Mars is somewhat inhospitable.
8771165
In a way yes/maybe.
If Equestria can pin point the exact universe they need to go to. They could send their ship to Earth, and work with NASA on a joint rescue mission. So the rescue ship might have a Sparkle Drive.
8771458
I want something like this to happen... or more likely Twilight accidentally strands herself on Earth while trying to fix the drive.
8771458
If they know the universe they don't need to send the ship with NASA, they can just get it close in their universe, recover the marooned ones, go back to their universe and travel there closer to were Earth would be before dropping our human. Traveling in our universe is a Bad Idea unless they can transmit magic between universes. If they can it becomes trivial, though.
I'd try to wall any of it off beyond what they're using and let that other bit decompress.
Starlight is going to be in such high demand.
They want to learn about magic now? They just happen to have possibly the best pony to supply them info.
8771479
I Haven't thought to crunch the numbers (if the numbers were given? don't remember). But I'm under the assumption that you could store enough magic power to power the Sparkle Drive to Mars and Back without needing to recharge. In which case it be easiest to move the ship to our Earth, and launch from there.
If that assumption is wrong, then they would have to use an approach like yours. But then they'd have to do a dimensional jump potentially very dangerous out by their mars, and jump back. That to me seems like it could be a very big issue.
Or insert deus ex machina and its no problem at all :p
We're going to end up with computers that cast magical spells written with the C++ stdmagic.h library, I tells ya!
Now that is some funny shit right there...
8771626
Oh dear. Debugging is about to get a whole lot more interesting.
8771626
Open Sorcery, anyone?
talk about bad luck all the way all the time i just hope the goo will fix that in fact i think that prob sould have something to fix this will soon
Remember this. Magical energy comes life in the story's universe. NASA and any other organizations playing around with magic once the basics are properly understood will have alot of energy to work with experimentation. Earth is covered in life. I imagine the energy fields is on par with the world Equestria is on.
8771674
nice,
All things considered, the air pressure in the cave isn't going to be the biggest problem in this bomb waiting to blow.
It'll be the flexing from reducing it. If the cave was going to blow from pressure due to a structural weakness, it would have done so at that threshold. Reducing pressure will reduce the strain, but it will also result in the roof settling a little, and that motion will open up cracks and further reduce integrity.
My old job had this HAPPEN with a test unit for a scientific tool that was built around a vacuum chamber. It had a lead-glass window for viewing in and was effectively a welded box. Boss took the test unit to NIST to demo it for them since they'd bought into the design of the tool. Mind you, boss isn't exactly a structural engineer, so he has no idea how many red flags the whole instrument was firing off in my mind (It was a flat-sided BOX made of steel plates, it flexed visibly when you pumped it down), but I was New Guy, and don't know jack, and the unit had flex in it since it was built as a welded box.
Well, he pumped it down, and it worked at the office, so, 'it would be fine'. Then at NIST, he pumped it down to demo the unit, and BOOM! The lead-glass window imploded in his FACE due it flexing and cracking. He's lucky it didn't take out his eyes. Apparently the implosion was so loud guys up at NIST came running into the room wondering what exploded.
MMMM... I remember vacuuming the mess up when he brought the unit back. Lead-glass dust, beryllium dust* (I kept my face away from the mess)... What a mess.
*Beryllium is part of an Xray detector that was installed in the unit. It's a film like portion the size of a quarter. I really do hope the guys at NIST didn't inhale it. And I hope the boss didn't inhale too much. It WAS right in his face went it went.
The 'it could go at any time' threat for the cave will be the permafrost melting, and I get the feeling we're about to have yet another attempt by mars to take someone out.
8771123
It's a star wars catchphrase. It's said at least once in every main movie, and gets a lampshade in Rogue One.
8771430 Seconded. I would literally pay to see even a paragraph or two describing the Collective Squee of Humanity™.