My Little Pony: My Little Pony The Martian

Mission Log – Solar Day 477

Hermes news: "The dust storm continues to expand, and the center is almost moving directly in your direction. Please continue to move forward with all your strength. Starting from tomorrow, we hope that you can adjust the angle of your route to a little bit east of due south. This is partly because the dust storm is moving due west, and partly because the surface is flatter and smoother in that direction. We will keep you informed of any new developments."

It's awesome. Therefore, the dust storm is growing and deepening, and the most serious part is targeting us. This is bad news. But the good news is...

...Um, I can't think of it at all.

According to the display on the rover's computer, although the battery was fully charged when we set off today, we only traveled 71.5 kilometers today compared to 71.1 yesterday. This is naturally because although none of the extended-range solar panels on the top of the rover was damaged during the entire driving process, which gave us a lot of surprises, the power generation capacity still dropped significantly. As for after I put out the other solar panels on the rover and started charging, the overall voltage generated by the solar array was only 92% of normal conditions, compared with 97% yesterday and 99.5% the day before.

Not much communication can be heard in today’s mobile homes. The dust storm cast a pall over everything - in every sense of the word.

Mission Log – Solar Day 478

Hermes message: "The dust storm is slowing down. Keep moving. All we can do is cross our fingers and pray."

Even if it doesn't come directly from NASA, you would never want to hear them say this.

When the battery reading reached the lower limit of 5%, which is "if you don't stop, you'll be asking for trouble", we only drove 70.3 kilometers. We are almost leaving Timiamata. The solar cell power generation efficiency is 83% of normal conditions.

Today we parked not far from a medium-sized crater that I think is only about ten kilometers wide. I walked up the edge of the crater - almost a kilometer back and forth.

As a reminder, the normal horizon on the Martian flats is generally only a little more than two thousand meters. But once you're on the crater wall, it's like standing on some elevated observation deck on Earth; you're much higher than the terrain you're looking at, so you can see slightly beyond the planet's horizon. something other than something. Under normal circumstances, I should be able to clearly see the far end wall of such a ten-kilometer-wide crater from this end.

Now I can barely see it at all. All he saw was a slightly larger hazy mass in the distance. In fact, the entire crater seemed to be shrouded in such a layer of smoke. From the corner of the eye walking along the crater wall, I could only see that the fog was getting thicker and thicker as we moved forward.

Looking up at the sky, basically no obvious changes can be seen. Although far from Earth, the sunlight here is still bright. There is no obvious cloud cover, and no dust storm front can be seen. It is far from the terrifying scene of the dust storm on Sol 6 or the previous thunder and lightning dust storm.

But the dust storm is right in front of us, and it's getting closer. And based on our current direction, if the distance traveled every day is 70 kilometers, then only about 22 kilometers of it can be regarded as driving in the direction of Schiaparelli.

I've been racking my brains lately to think of some way to improve power generation, driving efficiency, or both. The problem is, I can't think of anything. When we were testing the mobile RV before, we had tried all the ideas of not only the six of us on Mars, but also more than 50 engineers at NASA.

But if we can't think of any other way, what awaits us on this journey will not only be a longer journey... but also a bit more hungry.