My Little Pony: My Little Pony The Martian

Mission Log – Solar Day 45

Another long day of work, one day closer to the planned planting time. We have been busy taking care of the soil all day today, except of course Starlight. She worked with genius on the crystals on the ceiling of the cave, cutting off the tips of several large crystal pillars, carving them into neat pointed bud shapes, and turning them into some kind of sunlight relay device. Flying Fire carried the finished products and arranged them neatly and hung them directly above the cave, so that the cave had lighting - much brighter than I expected. Starlight tried to explain some details to me—something about how bud-shaped crystals increase their effective surface area, and so on—but Spitfire escorted her back to the rover before she could finish.

The ponies' work today was mainly to break up the relatively compact Martian soil in the cave, and the progress so far is pretty good. Of course, Starlight's previous spell gave them a good start. It left a large number of microscopic pores in the soil and loosened the soil in advance, allowing our improvised sled-soil rake dual-purpose agricultural tool to be easily inserted into the ground. Fireball and I's task of digging tunnels also got easier: in preparation for the ponies' clever idea to solve the cave heating problem.

On Earth, once you dig to a certain depth below the surface, you will find that the temperature becomes higher and higher. Our planet's crust is thin and a lot of heat accumulates inside. However, even if there is indeed residual heat inside Mars, it must be very deep; the cave we are in is actually even cooler than the surface temperature. Considering that most of the cave is buried under rock and permafrost, trying to heat the interior is equivalent to fighting against the most powerful radiator nature has ever created.

So how do the ponies plan to solve it? The answer is to use steam heating.

It seems like I need to give you a good idea. The ponies' spacecraft mainly relies on its own atmospheric exchange magic device for cabin heating. There were only a few emergency heaters carried in the spacecraft, and subsequent tests I conducted proved that they consume just as much power as I imagined. It felt like they just bought a few random electric heaters from a flea market or something like that and installed them on the spacecraft. inside. The electric power of each heater is close to two hundred watts, but we have to use it no matter what. After all, there are not many resources at hand, and we must make the best use of them.

I was able to borrow a couple of the large heaters on the rover, but decided against that because we didn't want to freeze on the way to and from the cave. Furthermore, even those small heaters would require me to hook up to eight residential solar panels and a hydrogen fuel cell to keep them running at night. Any more and the power supply in residential areas would drop below safe limits, and I'm not ready to take that risk at the moment.

We repaired the air supply system of the pony spacecraft a while ago, so I took this opportunity to turn off all the air supply in the living area and conduct a complete overhaul. (No major problems were discovered, by the way.) This meant we could move the pony ship's life support system into the cave and use it to flood the entire cave with equine air at the right temperature. Isn’t the problem solved just like that?

It's not that simple. There is also a geode several hundred meters long in front of the first chamber, which contains the fireball's food for the next four years. Furthermore, the highest point of the cave ceiling is probably several meters high, and warm air would circulate freely within the cave to reach the top, and we would be in big trouble. This means that the gas above will gradually cool and settle during the cycle, freezing all the crops below to death.

That shit is entropy, folks—even if you think you're getting a bargain, you end up paying for it anyway. We have no choice but to use the insulation layer removed from the pony spaceship to make a simple insulation curtain to cover the entrance to the next cave, and then we can only hope that something good will happen.

Fortunately, in addition to transporting air, Xiaoma's spacecraft life support system also has a water supply function - both hot and cold water, and the hot water was actually used by them to make hair and heat the crew's meals during the flight. The hot water function had been turned off before because we had only used cold water for a while, and the hot water flow was only about one-fifth of the cold water.

You may want to ask, the truth is correct, but what is the use of what you mentioned? I should mention here that although there are only a few backup heaters on the spacecraft, there are many cooling lines installed. In space, you cannot rely on the air and water in the surrounding environment to balance heat. Normally, one side of the spacecraft would be scorching in the sun (provided you were close enough to the sun), while the other side would be frozen in the freezing cold. This huge heat difference will threaten the operation of the instrument and even the safety of the occupants, so it is generally avoided through various means. Insulation is considered a kind of insulation, and the old-fashioned "barbeque roll" used by Apollo is also effective, but the ponies inserted a complete set of thermal insulation layers between the outer skin of the spacecraft and the pressurized cabin. Exchanger system - relies on the spacecraft's cold water supply to provide the working medium.

For NASA, water is definitely not an ideal coolant. After all, there are many chemicals with a wider liquid range and higher heat transfer efficiency than water. However, for ponies, the water supply on the spacecraft is almost unlimited, and it can be replenished at any time during the flight in case of leakage. Other options obviously do not have these benefits for them. (Also, I can’t help but picture a dragonfly or a fireball drinking coolant.)

So we have dozens of meters of pipeline on hand, and all the joints can be connected to the cold water outlet on the life support system control box. Today Dragonfly installed them all in long rows while Fireball and I worked on burying the pipes a few feet below the surface. One end of the pipe protruding from the ground will be connected to the life support system, and a valve will be installed on the other end to keep it in a normally open state so that water can circulate freely in the pipe. The overflow water can also be used for irrigation, or it can be used when not in use. It flows downhill, trickling deep into the cave.

But the real trick is yet to come - the ponies have arranged with their ground crew on the other side - to allow the cold and hot water flows to be exchanged. It doesn't take much effort, just exchange the positions of the two crystal stones on their end. So if all goes according to plan, the cooling water that flows into the pipes to disperse the uneven heat on the surface of the spacecraft will be replaced by actual boiling water, and the water released at the end of the pipes will only be barely above freezing.

The final effect is: Although the cave is not as deep as a tropical rainforest, and we may wear space suits for comfort when we are inside - astronauts generally would not say such things, but no matter what, The actual surface temperature of the planted crops can meet the basic growth conditions. In addition, part of the heat under the surface will also escape, and together with the air supply system, several heaters and the magical sunlight transmission of starlight, it will provide warmth, which is theoretically enough to protect the normal growth of surface plants.

In fact, the main flaw of this plan is that it severely limits the area of ​​cultivated land we can use. The selected cavern is twenty-one meters wide at its widest point, and the length from the airlock at the entrance to the narrow opening at the end is about one hundred and ten meters long. Visually, the entire land area is about less than half an acre, and the liquid heating system we made ourselves covers a much smaller area - only about 16 meters wide and 40 meters long, with a total area of ​​640 square meters. .

But even this is much better than the pitiful little bit of land in the habitation module. After a bit of math, I concluded that if a quarter of the field was planted with potatoes and the rest with alfalfa, the caves themselves would be enough to produce an almost unlimited sustainable food supply. . Of course, we also face many other problems, the most serious of which is that three-quarters of the first room of the cave is vacant, consuming the heat of the remaining quarter of the agricultural land. The irony of the situation is that we were always running out of space and the cave was now too big for us.

But after all, we only have one option at hand, and we can’t choose between three and four. The second chamber of the cave is like a forest of criss-crossing crystal pillars - a mineral fountain must have appeared in it for a while before it merged with the other caves. It's a lot of work getting all the equipment in there - and it's not much easier when it's time to get the harvest out. Besides, if something goes wrong in this cave one day, I think it's better to stay closer to the exit when escaping.

Tomorrow we will connect the power and life support systems, activate them and leave. When the air rushes in, there will be strong winds around the cave, and I don't want to stay around for death. Once we're done, we'll take a few days off to wait for our carefully designed temporary system to adjust to the environment as planned, and then - if nothing unexpected comes out of the blue - we'll use the excess nutrients we've cultivated. The soil is brought here and mixed with the shallow soil in the cave, after which the seeds can be planted.

I figured two days in the residential area would be enough. My CO2 filter cartridge consumption has been a bit high lately - be damned to those sleazy government contractors who only think about saving the budget all the time! Only staying in the habitation cabin can alleviate the wear and tear of the filter element... In addition, the potatoes I planted have also sprouted, and I have to spend some time to take good care of my future food.

Maybe we could watch a whole day's worth of TV series, completely throwing the Partridge family back into the spooky remnants of the 1970s, never to see the light of day again. To be honest, based on this, I think "Justice Strikes Back" is much better than it: the group of pretentious children in the show are really disgusting. Seriously, if I really wanted to find something cute to watch one day, I would...

...This is no joke. You see, the alien spacecraft commander is pink, and his eyes are half as big as her head. Even the somewhat eerie bug has a pair of big, shining eyes (but no pupils). Maybe I will become the first human being with diabetes on Mars.