My Little Pony: My Little Pony The Martian

Mission Log – Solar Day 402

Seventy-four point three thousand meters!

Let me explain to you future historians who are diligent and tireless in not letting go of any details, and will never hastily jump from chapter to chapter in the log pile to find highlights. The numbers mentioned above refer to the number of people who left the residential area early this morning. , until we drove back to the rover charging station three hours and fifteen minutes later with a 4% battery indication, the total number of miles we traveled was reported by the rover’s onboard computer.

We have the hugely successful third Sirius V mission in our hands, and we're celebrating it with... goddamn hay and goddamn potatoes, because how could there be anything else to celebrate. But the celebration should not be left behind, because today is an important milestone.

It’s about 551 kilometers from us to Schiaparelli. If we can make progress of kilometers every day, we can reach MAV in forty-six days. Even if we have to consider the time or power lost due to altitude changes or obstacles encountered along the way, at this speed, we will definitely have enough time to modify the vehicle when we arrive at the MAV and rendezvous with Hermes in orbit on Sol on time.

And even better, Starlight also came up with a simple but brilliant solution to heating the cave farm, turning certain crystals into heaters. The current situation is that without the ponies and their life support systems, the only heat source in the cave is the sunlight relay crystals... Needless to say, they are useless at night. But if the newly added heating crystals are added with photosensitive properties, they can only operate at night and stop generating heat during the day, making the temperature of the cave environment more stable and preventing freezing at night. It's certainly not as good as a thermostat, but it's close enough.

Overall, these two Christmas gifts are pretty good.

We also discussed whether we should give each other Christmas keepsakes made of crystal, scrap metal, and the like. In the end we decided to forget it. Sun Day 551 We can't take much with us when we leave, and no matter which side of the world we return to first, the things we can buy in the stores are bound to be much better. So our activity tonight is that I teach them to sing all the Christmas songs I can think of. (They all have endless questions about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.) And of course, there’s a traditional holiday family dinner of fucking hay and goddamn potatoes, for obvious reasons.

Tomorrow we'll drive the combined mobile home to the cave, start making heated crystals of starlight, and then have a slumber party in the trailer. After all, there was no reason to wait, and if something happened to the trailer's life support system, the cave would make a good shelter as well as a habitable cabin.

If all goes well, we'll be trying out Sirius 7: The Complete Rehearsal in just a few days. Drive as far as you can in a straight line until the battery runs out, set up a few extra solar panels to charge the rover, spend the night there, and then return the next day. If there is no problem with this, then we can officially set off.

To be honest, I can't tell whether I hope everything is normal or that something big will go wrong. On the one hand, I want to see that the test results are all normal, and then go on the road with peace of mind; but from another perspective, discovering problems under the conditions where we are now close to a relatively safe environment is definitely better than trying to move forward on the Arabian Platform. It's much better to be in a ghost place with no shop at the back of the village, plagued by a bunch of minor ailments for no apparent reason.

No matter what kind of hope you have, you can only pray here.

Mission Log – Solar Day 403

Damn it, finish the big egg.

I'm writing this in a cave with my notebook. It was almost midnight on Mars, and we could only huddle together to keep each other warm, clinging to the pony life support system and RTG that were quickly removed from the vehicle in record time when we decided to abandon the vehicle and escape the mobile ice cellar.

Thinking about it afterwards, it was obvious that this would be the result. The RTG itself is indeed enough to heat the rover cabin - the heat is enough to be a bit too much. At that time, in order to prevent myself from being roasted, I had to remove part of the insulation layer of the rover. However, the disassembled cabin of the Pony spacecraft is very open. The internal space is more than four times that of the rover cabin, and the surface area is correspondingly larger.

There is no insulation material on the pony spaceship. For reasons that I suspect made sense to them when they first made the decision, all of the spacecraft's insulation was sandwiched between the inner and outer hulls, and contained the numerous lines for the cooling system and various other equipment. When we dismantled the outer cabin shell and recycled scrap metal, the insulation layer was basically destroyed by us at the same time. And it didn’t occur to us then to save it for later. The largest piece of material became a temporary curtain separating the farm from the tangled corridors.

So now we are beginning to regret our original decision, because without that layer of insulation material, there is only a bare layer of metal cabin shell with extremely strong thermal conductivity, which continuously absorbs heat from the cabin. By the time we decided to abandon the car and run away, the moisture from our breath could already be seen in the cabin. It was really cold.

There is indeed a heater in the spacecraft, but it is only for emergency use. It will consume two hundred watts of electricity, and the two hundred watts at night, even if the one hundred watts of power supply provided by RTG are subtracted, will still consume a little more than an entire pirate ninja every night, so our second When you start driving in the morning, you will lose so much electricity accordingly. Our goal is to get through the whole night with only one hundred watts of power output from the RTG, so that the battery should be full when we start driving in the morning.

I'm already trying to figure out how to fix this. I don’t think we can re-insulate the entire spacecraft, and we must stick the insulation layer inside the cabin instead of outside the cabin. In this case, it will be a lot of work to deal with the entire spacecraft. . In order to save time and energy, and to concentrate the heat in one place at night, my idea is that we should focus the insulation work on the accommodation section. At night, we will close the airtight hatch leading to the bridge and cut off the air circulation with the bridge and rover, and concentrate all heat sources into such a cabin.

It's bound to get very crowded inside; sleeping bags are usually hung from the locker facades due to sleeping in zero gravity. And except for those large magic batteries, all other batteries are also stored in the living cabin to maximize energy absorption as much as possible. Space inside the cabin is absolutely precious.

The question is: where do we find insulation materials? What little we had saved from before was not even enough to wall the living quarters. Asking Dragonfly to try spitting insulation was flatly rejected - but I can't blame her. If it were me, I wouldn't want to vomit non-stop for more than a week.

When we were preparing for the dust storm on Solar Day 247, the canvas of the residential cabin that was cut from the top of the inflatable tent to provide electrical grounding for the cave farm is still there. The thermal insulation performance of canvas is actually better than that of ordinary insulation materials. In fact, there was originally this design requirement, not only to block the radiation of cosmic rays, but also to prevent the heat from leaking out of the cabin. However, the bit of canvas that was left behind was so small that it could only be hung like a small table mat on the old docking hatch at the top of the habitation section of the spacecraft. Other than that, the only canvas resources are the second inflatable tent and the living cabin itself. However, it would be too hasty to rush into pieces that have ensured our survival for the past four hundred days.

Another source of insulation is the cabin of Rover 1. You may still remember that at that time, the rover's cabin was completely removed from the chassis and became a permanent radio parts library connecting the habitation module and the pathfinder. Since the only life-support equipment remaining in the cabin is an air tank, in order to save air, we occasionally wear spacesuits when we enter the cabin, so the insulation here can indeed be used for other purposes. However, there are problems with this: the cabin is made of foam insulation, which is almost impossible to completely dismantle and transfer.

In fact, there is another possibility; take all the hay that the ponies will definitely not eat and stuff it into the cabin to act as an insulation layer. The cabin won't smell good after a hundred and fifty days on the road, but it might help, so as long as you have enough materials, it's worth considering.

Maybe it will be easier when I wake up tomorrow morning. Maybe all we need to do is cut off the air circulation, and then the heat generated by the RTG will be enough to heat the accommodation section.

Maybe tomorrow the Princess of Mars will suddenly appear in front of me and order me to be her concubine and take several others as her maids.

As for now, I can only find an empty spot in the hill they made and squeeze in to sleep, hoping that our body heat will help us spend the night comfortably.

Mission Log – Solar Day 403 (2)

Hello humans. I am Spitfire. I write this because Mark is hurt. He blocked my back hoof when I felt something poking my butt. I'm sorry but I couldn't help it.

Starlight Glimmer couldn't stop laughing. She said that I also thought it was funny when she encountered this kind of thing on the way to find the Pathfinder. I don't remember it being like that.

Mission Log – Solar Day 403 (3)

Mark is back. She directly kicked me firmly in the heart. For more than half an hour after that, my breathing felt very special. But I don't think anything really exploded with her hoof. Nothing to worry about, at least not until I noticed I started peeing blood.

It's three o'clock in the morning after riding a horse in the desert. Maybe we can get three hours of actual sleep, and we won't wake me up with a hammer drill on my stomach in the middle of sleep...