My Little Pony: My Little Pony The Martian

Mission Log – Solar Day 96

The ponies take good care of Cave Farm. I went to check it out yesterday, and it's pretty warm there now. I'm even considering removing one or two of the heaters from the original pony spaceship so I can put some of the stolen solar panels back into the living area. Hot air rises, and my guess is that the cave's airtightness relies on a solid layer of permafrost at the top, so being too warm inside is not a good thing. But now that I have contacted NASA, this issue should be left to the new group of botanists they said they have recruited to worry about.

To be honest, looking at the growth of these plants, I even feel that they are a little too lush. Their current growth rate is probably equivalent to that of plants under normal light conditions on Earth, and may even be slightly faster. As for the alfalfa, judging from the height, it is almost ready to be harvested. The potatoes were also thriving; I dug up two of them to take a look and found that they had grown a large number of immature tubers. It's still green and far from the final harvest; but I have a feeling it will be a bountiful harvest by then.

In addition, eight seedlings of other plants sprouted along the east side of the cave, parallel to the planting area. It is unknown who planted them. When I mentioned them, Berry looked guilty about it. Apparently she buried some cherry kernels and they sprouted. I'm not angry with her, I'm just a little confused, because the results she has achieved so far are completely fantasy; cherries need to go through the severe cold of winter - a whole cycle of cold winter - before their cores can If they survive, they will have to wait several months for them to germinate, not to mention that some cherry cores cannot sprout seedlings from the very beginning.

But there they were, right in front of me—eight petite twigs with leaves that, at the moment, didn’t look like cherries. If it were in a garden, I wouldn't hesitate to shovel them out as weeds. But just seventy-five solar days ago, they were still fresh fruits; and now, thanks to some magic the berries have cast, they have become living, photosynthetic plants. I would never get rid of them, and not just because it would break Berry's heart; for the first time ever, we are witnessing magic and botany working together to create miracles. From now on, I will definitely record every bit of progress, after all, this is how I got my degree.

Anyway, not much communication with Earth today. They were probably still digesting the big news about the real existence of magic. All pony issues were put on hold until we figured out how to get the picture transfer feature working.

NASA wants to save today's transmission bandwidth for another Pathfinder system software update, and will also send a new application to the rover to try to convert the images into something that can be understood by the Pathfinder-Sojourner parser. Understand the format. If this works, I'll be able to start sending out the photos I've had a long backlog of here. Of course, the video still doesn't work. Moreover, my upload time is also limited to the afternoon. I have to wait until I check in every day and do some Q&A with the nerds on the earth. Even if using Hermes as a signal relay can effectively shorten the transmission distance and increase the bandwidth, the data transmission still has a very obvious bottleneck. The speed is like sucking an extremely thin straw, and sometimes it is not even as fast as a hollow coffee stirrer. Great.

Venkat Kapol flew back to Houston today, so today's conversation is all with JPL's Bruce Wu. He recently had a breakthrough idea that would make at least part of the radio system in the residential area operational temporarily, so I wouldn't have to spend the entire morning in the rover wearing a space suit. Unlike the previous plan of using the radio system from Rover 1 and laying a new cable through the bulkhead of the habitation module, this time we are going to use some kind of equipment that I actually have extra here... from the space suit. Radio module!

Each space suit has a small antenna on top of its helmet. Each suit can talk to the rover from a distance of about two kilometers—slightly farther than a walkie-talkie on Earth. As long as the antenna array in the residential area is still intact, the distance to receive the spacesuit radio can be even further, but if you just want to communicate with a radio device separated by a wall, the distance of two kilometers is definitely enough. And since the antenna can work normally in a vacuum, we naturally don't have to figure out how to stuff it into an inflatable tent!

That leaves only one problem: The output power of the residential area radio system transmitter is much greater than the power output of the space suit radio module to the antenna. Too much electricity could melt the gadget right off the bat. So they're using backup antennas there at the Johnson Center for testing. (They have a lot more of them now: all the spacesuit helmets previously manufactured for the Ares 4 and 5 projects have been scrapped and recycled, and new contractors are building improved models that will ensure the front door of the habitation module one day The helmet visor won't just shatter into pieces when it suddenly flies up and blows you in the face.) If the power output is indeed too high for our use case, they'll want to figure out how to reduce it before I mess around on Mars. The best solution for energy output.

But assuming they find a solution, in a day or two I'm going to retrieve the helmet I left in airlock one, remove the antenna from it, and use some spare comms parts to connect it to Go up to the remaining end of the cable leading to the antenna tower. Obviously it won't be able to communicate directly with the Earth, and it probably won't be able to communicate with any of the satellites in orbit here, but it will still be possible to connect to the rover. The rover can then connect to Pathfinder, which can then communicate with Earth.

I wonder if this was the case at the beginning of the Internet. Maybe I should put a camera on my coffee pot and ask NASA to register a domain name for me called mars_coffee_pot.

Anyway, enough chatting for today. In a little while I'm going to help Starlight and Dragonfly convert their units of measurement to ours so they can let us know how powerful those remaining engines are. In addition, I also need to find out the specific output power and band of the pony radio so that we can use it as a backup or parallel communication system.

But right now I’m devouring my pile of emails! I haven't received any emails since Solar Day 5!

Of course, they didn't send all the letters at once, otherwise there would be too many. NASA wants to manage not only the transmission bandwidth I use, but also my personal time. They definitely don't want me to waste my whole day replying to thousands of emails. So what they send now are only the best products.

So far I've seen two letters from the president (all templated, haha), an email from the Pope, half a dozen rock stars, and a few movie stars (my favorite letter is from... Chris Evans—that’s Chris Evans!!!), several scientists, and other notable figures.

But the most important thing to me is this letter from my mother. The content was completely predictable, with no surprises: thank God you're alive, don't die, your dad says hello, we haven't returned your Christmas present yet, etc.

Yet I read it over and over again. It reminded me how important it is to ultimately make it back alive.

Anyway, I have to get started now. Berry is anxiously waiting for good news from NASA about whether we can soar into the sky like MacGyver and leave this hellish place.

But first I'll have to read the letter again.

Transcript – Hydraulic Telegraph Switch – ESA Maltimore Center ＜-＞ ESA spacecraft AMICITAS

ESA: Maltimore calls Amicitas, communicating via starlight space suit, completed.

AMICITAS: Dragonfly – Amicitas calls Maltimore, over.

ESA: Be prepared to receive a long message relayed to Mark and the others. complete.

AMICITAS: Standby, over.

ESA: Inhabitants of Planet Earth! The residents of Equestria send you our warmest greetings! I, Princess Twilight Sparkle, greet you in the name of friendship and harmony among our worlds, and thank you for the generous hospitality and gracious hospitality you have shown...

ESA: Maltimore calls Amicitas, over.

AMICITAS: Amicitas calls Maltimore, over.

ESA: Why did you turn off the life support system of the Starlight space suit? complete.

AMICITAS: How long was that message? complete.

ESA: Not too long. It's about the twenty-fifth station. complete.

AMICITAS: You're fucking kidding me, over.

ESA: Good diplomatic relations are the backbone of Amicitas' long-term mission, over.

AMICITAS: Please, can I talk to Spike or Moondancer? complete.

ESA: cocoon – parenthesis. I was a little curious and wanted to come over and take a look, but I tripped over Twilight's scroll. Let me explain it to the long-winded princess. Are there any restrictions? complete.

AMICITAS: Dragonfly – How is my queen! None of us here know how to say even half of the words in Twilight's speech in English. We also cannot record text longer than one paragraph. In addition, the floor of the living cabin is already soaked, that's it.

ESA: Cocoon Cocoon – Understand. Stand by, ready for a much shorter message than before, a perfect princess speech. complete.

AMICITAS: Standby, over.

The first order of business in today's meeting in Teddy's office concerned a message that arrived from Mars just before the daily transmission window closed.

And Anne said what almost everyone here was thinking: "What the f*ck is this?"

This message has been distributed to all participants and is printed on a thin piece of paper. The content is:

[16:11] Watney: Here are the dragonflies again. Mark told us not to do it, but our boss there wanted to say hello. Their first message was too long and the vocabulary too difficult for us to translate; so my ruler sent this message on behalf of Princess Twilight Sparkle, the originator of the pony space program:

"I am Princess Twilight Sparkle. Say hello to Earth. I declare this bridge/bank/library/store open."

I don't know what it means, but my ruler thinks it's the best speech a princess can give. Sorry, I'm not sure where you end with this word.

(Side note: I looked up the word “announced” anyway.)

Only Teddy Sanders smiled knowingly at the news. "I understand what this means," he said. "Venkat, please reply for me: 'Tell the ruler of Dragonfly that there are people here who fully understand this sentence.'" He then shook his head and added Said, "I really wish I could take on some members of Congress like this."

"Okay." Venkat had not yet recovered from the red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Houston and seemed a little drowsy. "We will tell them when we remind them not to occupy bandwidth during the software update process."

"No, no need," Teddy said. "Mark can handle it. Just send diplomacy."

"What kind of alien idea is this?" Annie roared, "Is this how the first interstellar diplomacy was handled?"

"This passage," Teddy said, still smiling, "will be recorded verbatim in every history book from now on. I guarantee it."

The meeting then moved on to discuss more important agenda items.