My Little Pony: My Little Pony The Martian

AMICITAS Mission Three – Mission Day 514

ARES 3 solar day 504

In the early days of the solar system, a huge meteor hit the surface of Mars, carving out a giant crater hundreds of kilometers wide. The large amount of ejecta thrown out by this huge impact caused countless secondary collisions, which eventually created the unique rocky and undulating topography of the surrounding area around the crater.

However, Mars was still a newborn world at that time, full of geological and hydrological activities. Smaller impact craters weathered into inconspicuous hills and rock ridges. The giant crater became a huge lake, which was gradually silted up by the sediment left over over the millennia. Then, during the years when Mars gradually froze and dehydrated, the lake area flooded again during a short period of wet climate, and the flowing water washed into the soil to form the unique layers and ripples, which finally attracted the attention of Earth civilization billions of years later, inspiring them to send the first probe and a manned scientific expedition mission to explore this crater.

At some point in time, long after the formation of the large crater, and long before humans began to send machines to explore this place, a smaller space object hit the rim of the northwest side of the crater. The impact of this alien visitor caused a landslide, leaving a huge gap between the new crater and the towering crater walls left by the old crater. The hotter air rising from the bottom of the crater left a low-pressure void, and the thin atmosphere of the planet immediately discovered this new shortest path and caused the air to take a shortcut through this gap.

Air currents carried dust from all directions, which was weathered by cliffs, swept from lowlands that were once flooded, or occasionally erupted from volcanoes on the other side of the planet. The dust settled layer by layer, gradually burying the broken remains of the landslide, and accumulating a slope that extends from the gap down to the depths of the ancient crater.

Time, gravity, and the occasional, increasingly rare, warm and wet spells on Mars have compacted the slopes... but they work unevenly. In some places the dust is compacted into solid rock or settled firmly on impact-hardened fragments of the original crater walls; in others the dust remains loose and easily shaken, a deadly trap for unwary travelers.

The travelers were not careless when they came. Although the slope was not steep, there were many places along the way that were sometimes steep and sometimes slow. The surface was also covered with countless sand dunes, some of which were small enough to be easily bypassed, while others required the travelers to carefully discuss and plan before crossing them with extreme caution. Even those places where the sand dunes could not be seen were all tightly covered with a thick layer of sand and dust, which cleanly wiped out the few traces of the alien environment that the travelers relied on for visual reference.

A lone traveler would have suffered greatly in such a treacherous terrain. Fortunately, on such a day, the six of them who entered the crater were not alone.

A bipedal figure and a quadrupedal figure in space suits walked down a steep slope, advancing left and right, zigzagging and patrolling, trying to cover the surrounding ground as completely as possible in the search. The vehicle they were guiding was right behind them, a huge and bulky body made up of various parts, slowly moving under the drive of huge wheels, keeping a safe distance all the way.

During one of his explorations to the left, the bipedal scout inadvertently crossed a buried terrain divide. To his right, sand and gravel were firmly piled on a compacted ancient sandstone; to his left, beneath the sand and soil was a collapse of loose dust that could shake at any time - exactly the same dangerous scene he remembered from his childhood in that distant foreign homeland. His left boot landed, and immediately he missed a step and fell down the slope with his whole body. Of course, the slope below him also rolled down with him in the collapse, sinking a full forty meters before reaching a new balance point and stabilizing.

The scout righted himself in the waist-deep sand that had fallen behind the slide. His battle-hardened, tough-looking space suit made it through the test with ease, and the light, fine-grained dust and gravel did not damage it at all. A few commands were enough to stop the four-legged scout on the slope from trying to rush down the slope to rescue him. After further discussion with the passengers in the car, they were guided to drive away from the area affected by the slide.

While another person on the slope carefully walked down the edge revealed by the landslide and continued to lead the rover to a safe road, the two-legged scout struggled to get himself out of the pit, and then maintained the same cautious attitude as when he guided the vehicle before the landslide, slowly crawling over the loose sand until his hands and feet felt that he was back on solid and reliable ground and successfully escaped.

Within just fifteen minutes the situation calmed down, and the two scouts led the vehicles behind them down the gravel-strewn sandy slope.

Transcript – Audio call – ESA spacecraft AMICITAS ＜-＞ NASA research vehicle HERMES

(Note: Due to the speed of light, the one-way communication delay exceeds four minutes)

AMICITAS: Hermes, Friendship calling. Sirius is parked and ready. That's all for today. A little surprise along the way, but otherwise a pretty dull ride. Mark is setting up the solar panels for the rest of today's - or rather, this solar day - charging, but he says we're still above 60% because we're going so slowly. That's a good thing, considering we'll soon be in the shadowed area of ​​the crater rim. Over.

HERMES: Roger that, Friendship. We're reporting that you've covered approximately nineteen kilometers in eight hours today. You're about halfway down the slope. We'd like you to keep heading due south as much as possible. About ten kilometers south-southeast of your current position, the center of the slope drops off abruptly thirty meters. Keeping heading due south should ensure the gentlest possible descent. Over.

AMICITAS (Fireball): Copy that, Hermes. I'll tell Mark. Over.

HERMES: Um, hello Fireball. I didn't expect to hear from you today. So how are you out there today? Over.

AMICITAS (Fireball): That's boring. Mars tried to kill me once today. I only fell about thirty meters. How can a dragon almost die here? Over.

HERMES: Um...

HERMES: Hey, I told you, this guy's gotta get along! He's got a lot of energy! Hey, Fireball, have you ever thought about joining the military?

HERMES: Fireball, I could give you a list of methods, but the communication window is not long enough to send it out.

HERMES: We heard you fell. Glad to hear you're OK. Glad to hear your English is improving. Be careful tomorrow. Things can go wrong when you're so close to your goal.

HERMES: Uh... is everyone finished? Okay. Over.

AMICITAS (Fireball): (Pony) Of course I'll be careful, that's bullshit. (English) Yes, we'll be careful. Now I'm hungry. Missed lunch. Friendship communication ends.

Mission Log – Solar Day 505

Have any of you ever thought about being a parade float driver? Just imagine it. How could anyone be so crazy as to willingly drive a huge, bulky platform at a crawling pace for hours on end? It's a mind-numbing job in itself, not to mention the fact that you have to be on your toes all the time to avoid running over one of the clowns that are walking around the float or crashing into something like a curb fire hydrant. It's a terrible job.

So let's just imagine the RV is a parade float. Except there's no Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade or Rose Bowl Parade, just the Schiaparelli Basin Homecoming Parade that I'm steering. It's two days long. And there's no wide, smooth city road ahead, but I'm guiding the tandem rover down a sometimes-sloping, sometimes-droughty slope that's been stuffed with every conceivable obstacle short of a canyon or a glacier by this planet. And I'm trying to keep a slow two kilometers an hour the whole time, accelerating only when the loose dust on the surface threatens to sink the RV.

But now we have finally made it, thank God. The ground has returned to flatness, the dunes have shrunk to smaller than the wheels of the rover, and the sand in between has become thinner. We have only encountered one minor incident in the past two days. Indeed, if Fireball and Meimei had not been leading the way, this would definitely have led to a major accident, but with their presence, the crisis was resolved into a small moment of shock and a little bit of fear for a while afterwards.

Have I mentioned recently how grateful I am to my alien companions? You know, I know, it's true. Not only have they kept me sane for so long (no exaggeration, anyone on this planet would go crazy if they stayed there for too long), but they've also helped me avoid so many fatal blows. (Yes, they were responsible for a few of those, but if you really count, I've given a lot of bad advice myself. You have to be realistic.)

We have traveled over 3400 kilometers on this planet so far. We have just over 508 kilometers left. If all goes well, we expect to reach the MAV on Sol . This will give us days to prepare the MAV before our final escape.

Here's a little cultural knowledge: In Viking belief, demons belong to Muspelheim, a land of fire and sulfur. However, evil spirits cannot go there. On the contrary, if you are not a good Viking, your final destination will be Niflheim, which is extremely cold, damp and miserable all year round. In other words, the Vikings believed that the cold was more terrifying than the fire.

After a year and a half on Mars, I began to understand the Viking way of thinking. But I'd rather not die in Valhalla, because I don't want to die on the battlefield. I prefer to die like the dean of Nether University; my ideal way of dying is to die of old age.

There are three days left to drive. There are forty-six days left until launch.

Nowadays we just live one day at a time.