PROMPT: A probe to Mars makes a startling discovery: Another probe that we did not send.
“It doesn’t look like anything...” He stopped, hearing what he was about to say echo around the world in blog posts and opinion pieces. He cleared his throat, fiddled with the zoom on the external camera.
“It’s clearly something.” She sounded irritated. He couldn’t tell if she didn’t hear his ellipsis, and was irritated because there was obviously something sitting there, or if she did hear it and was irritated by its implications being stupid, or whether she was irritated by his cowardice at refusing to state the obvious.
The omnipresent mic allowed them to communicate in the airless capsule, allowed them to get laggy feedback from earth, but it was never far from his mind that every word he spoke into it would be heard by literally everybody. If he said something questionable, it would follow him forever.
The omnipresent mic impeded communication by making it potentially painful to say something stupid.
The thing was clearly sitting there, whatever it was. He was watching it grow on the monitors as they overtook it, not-quite-matching orbits bringing them to their not-quite-intersection point.
“It’s not Russian,” she said. “It’s not ours.” He looked over at her panel; she had a list of silhouettes of the spacecraft-of-many-nations up and was scrolling through it.
“Not Indian,” he said. “Not Chinese.”
Communication lag with Earth was right around ten minutes, just now; they had about seven minutes left before people back there were going to start chiming in.
He glanced at her panel again; he couldn’t see her face, the way the helmets were designed and the seats were arranged, so looking at what she was doing was as close as he could get to seeing what she was thinking. She was thinking, he concluded, the same thing he was.
The thing didn’t have anything that looked like a thrust nozzle. It was long and smooth, shaped like a gel-cap with a bulge in the middle. So how did it get here? Was there a solar sail that had long since jettisoned? Was the thing on a ballistic course, just fired here by something and completely unpowered?
Or maybe there was some other, unknown propulsion scheme at work... He could think of at least three experimental or proposed-but-not-yet-tried schemes that could be at work inside of that thing.
None of which, he had to admit, were in fact being actually used to send things to Mars. At least as far as he knew. At least not by humans.
Having said it out loud in his internal voice, he felt the trueness of the statement: The thing they were looking at -- smooth, red, just hanging there in orbit... wait...
He ran a quick calculation on the thing, capturing its orbital characteristics from the various video feeds. It was... sure enough, it was geostationary, hanging a fixed distance above a fixed point on the surface.
Two things: One, it was more or less impossible to maintain a geostationary orbit around Mars for any length of time without active stationkeeping -- meaning some sort of propulsion; and two, if it was geostationary, if someone had gone to the trouble to make it stay in one spot, there was some reason for it -- there was something down there, on the surface, right below that thing.
So. How close was that point to their intended landing zone? A few more calculations... not that close, really. Not on the other side of the planet, but not... close.
He looked over at her panels; she had a screen up watching the calculations he was doing, another doing something...
Ah, he’d missed it: the thing was maneuvering.
Everything he did, everything she did, involving the computers, was going back to Earth in a continuous stream; so whatever happened next, at least people on Earth would see.
The maneuver wasn’t much; it just inched out a tad. Sideways. Just... moved.
Stationkeeping, he realized; continuous stationkeeping. Rather than a big burn every so often, it was constantly in tiny motion, keeping itself in position.
So, not ballistic.
They shot past the thing, their downward spiral around the planet intersecting its nice, simple, place-holding orbit; there were markings on the thing, clearly visible on the monitors, but they didn’t mean anything to him. He stared at it as it went past, thinking, to himself, “Hi there, what the hell are you?”
The voice of mission control, which he’d tuned out for ten minutes or so now, just a droning, soothing background noise during their descent, suddenly took on a new note of tension, and he tuned it back in.
“What the hell is that?”
He smiled, thinking that for the next ten minutes he’d be listening to Mission control go crazy about the thing that they’d just passed. He checked the time: they had about that long before they deployed retro-thrusters and began final descent.
It would be a while before they got enough habitat together to garner the resources to go see what the hell was at that spot on the surface below that thing in orbit; but his mission priorities, already among the most interesting things a human could be doing, had just gotten more interesting.
“It doesn’t look like anything...” He stopped, hearing what he was about to say echo around the world in blog posts and opinion pieces. He cleared his throat, fiddled with the zoom on the external camera.
“It’s clearly something.” She sounded irritated. He couldn’t tell if she didn’t hear his ellipsis, and was irritated because there was obviously something sitting there, or if she did hear it and was irritated by its implications being stupid, or whether she was irritated by his cowardice at refusing to state the obvious.
The omnipresent mic allowed them to communicate in the airless capsule, allowed them to get laggy feedback from earth, but it was never far from his mind that every word he spoke into it would be heard by literally everybody. If he said something questionable, it would follow him forever.
The omnipresent mic impeded communication by making it potentially painful to say something stupid.
The thing was clearly sitting there, whatever it was. He was watching it grow on the monitors as they overtook it, not-quite-matching orbits bringing them to their not-quite-intersection point.
“It’s not Russian,” she said. “It’s not ours.” He looked over at her panel; she had a list of silhouettes of the spacecraft-of-many-nations up and was scrolling through it.
“Not Indian,” he said. “Not Chinese.”
Communication lag with Earth was right around ten minutes, just now; they had about seven minutes left before people back there were going to start chiming in.
He glanced at her panel again; he couldn’t see her face, the way the helmets were designed and the seats were arranged, so looking at what she was doing was as close as he could get to seeing what she was thinking. She was thinking, he concluded, the same thing he was.
The thing didn’t have anything that looked like a thrust nozzle. It was long and smooth, shaped like a gel-cap with a bulge in the middle. So how did it get here? Was there a solar sail that had long since jettisoned? Was the thing on a ballistic course, just fired here by something and completely unpowered?
Or maybe there was some other, unknown propulsion scheme at work... He could think of at least three experimental or proposed-but-not-yet-tried schemes that could be at work inside of that thing.
None of which, he had to admit, were in fact being actually used to send things to Mars. At least as far as he knew. At least not by humans.
Having said it out loud in his internal voice, he felt the trueness of the statement: The thing they were looking at -- smooth, red, just hanging there in orbit... wait...
He ran a quick calculation on the thing, capturing its orbital characteristics from the various video feeds. It was... sure enough, it was geostationary, hanging a fixed distance above a fixed point on the surface.
Two things: One, it was more or less impossible to maintain a geostationary orbit around Mars for any length of time without active stationkeeping -- meaning some sort of propulsion; and two, if it was geostationary, if someone had gone to the trouble to make it stay in one spot, there was some reason for it -- there was something down there, on the surface, right below that thing.
So. How close was that point to their intended landing zone? A few more calculations... not that close, really. Not on the other side of the planet, but not... close.
He looked over at her panels; she had a screen up watching the calculations he was doing, another doing something...
Ah, he’d missed it: the thing was maneuvering.
Everything he did, everything she did, involving the computers, was going back to Earth in a continuous stream; so whatever happened next, at least people on Earth would see.
The maneuver wasn’t much; it just inched out a tad. Sideways. Just... moved.
Stationkeeping, he realized; continuous stationkeeping. Rather than a big burn every so often, it was constantly in tiny motion, keeping itself in position.
So, not ballistic.
They shot past the thing, their downward spiral around the planet intersecting its nice, simple, place-holding orbit; there were markings on the thing, clearly visible on the monitors, but they didn’t mean anything to him. He stared at it as it went past, thinking, to himself, “Hi there, what the hell are you?”
The voice of mission control, which he’d tuned out for ten minutes or so now, just a droning, soothing background noise during their descent, suddenly took on a new note of tension, and he tuned it back in.
“What the hell is that?”
He smiled, thinking that for the next ten minutes he’d be listening to Mission control go crazy about the thing that they’d just passed. He checked the time: they had about that long before they deployed retro-thrusters and began final descent.
It would be a while before they got enough habitat together to garner the resources to go see what the hell was at that spot on the surface below that thing in orbit; but his mission priorities, already among the most interesting things a human could be doing, had just gotten more interesting.
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