The Next Continent (31 page)

SIX MONTHS HAD
passed since NASA had broadcast its declaration of war to the world. From time to time, Tae replayed Ringstone's press conference to strengthen her resolve.

“Overconfidence is the enemy. NASA is the best of the best.” She looked up at her Eden, floating in the night sky, and whispered to herself, “Americans are so talented at making friends…far more than I am.”

[2]

THE GASOLINE-POWERED
Chevrolet sped through the earlysummer sunlight of Pasadena and through the gate of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains.

The driver, a blond woman in a fiery scarlet suit, jumped out and strode quickly into the Space Flight Operations Facility. As she hurried toward a room next to mission control, she was inputting data into the wearcom embedded in her sunglasses with her left hand.

In her mid-thirties, Caroline Cadbury was operations administrator for NASA's Liberty Island Unmanned Engineering Phase. She yanked open the door of the Unmanned Operations Support Room and bellowed, “What's going on?
All
the boys are down?”

Her team sat at their bank of consoles. They swiveled to look at her. One stood up: a tall, beefy man who looked more like a truck driver than a NASA controller. He was pale.

“That's right, Carol. All twenty-five rovers and five scrapers.”

“What the hell happened? Did you have them playing football?”

“No. There were no collisions. We were operating by the book.” Joseph Lambach waved his hands apologetically. He was the “driver” for the engineering equipment, though with the two-way communications delay he could not control their speed and direction in real time. The rovers' AI programming let them move independently. Lambach's job was to assign objectives—ordering the vehicles to move a certain boulder, grade a site to a certain shape and dimensions, and so on.

“If there wasn't a collision, what happened?” Caroline was boiling with frustration. With her good looks, men tended to underestimate her, but this morning her fury was not showing her off to best effect.

Lambach winced. “We have a power supply problem. The charging stations are down. The rovers can't recharge their fuel cells. They've all gone into sleep mode.”

“Show me the telemetry and any suspicious-looking video. Craig! Conference me with the rover tech supervisor at LPL!”

Craig initiated a call to the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Caroline threw herself into a chair and started reviewing the telemetry data on her wearcom.

“I don't understand. All the chargers are off-line. But we have five stations and five solar arrays. Everything's networked. The only way this could happen would be if all five bridges were cut or all the arrays destroyed. Even a meteor strike should've left two or three stations online. Do we have video?”

Her display switched to video. She used the wearcom's controller, hanging like a pendant from the frame of her glasses, to page through the images. “I don't see any evidence of damage,” she muttered.

“It's a long shot, but the circuits may have been damaged. The rovers' motherboards were designed for Mars. It has an atmosphere. It's farther from the sun. The circuits weren't shielded for the intensity of the solar wind on the moon. But everything went fine during the simulations.”

“Even so,” said Caroline, “the vehicles have redundant control. Self-diagnostic telemetry doesn't indicate any problems. Wait a minute—what's this?”

Caroline marked the image on her display. One of the solar arrays, a long panel on an aluminum frame extending horizontally over the surface. The panel was nearly vertical. NASA had not had time to experiment with Sixth Continent's spring-loaded deployment techniques. Instead, they used conventional rigid panels, tugged open in sections by a small rover, like an accordion. The panels had been proven on the ISS, and the rover had been developed for the Mars missions.

The image Caroline had selected showed dark mottling over the silver surface of the panel, as if it had been blackened with candle soot. “This looks like dust contamination. How did it happen?”

“Carol, I have Arizona,” said Craig.

“Plug me in.” The face of an LPL research scientist came up. Caroline didn't waste time with greetings. “We think the solar array may have been contaminated with regolith. Did you run simulations on anything like that in your moon garden?”

“Panel contamination? I'll check right away.”

LPL's “moon garden” was a large-scale mock-up of the Liberty Island site, identical in every respect to the actual terrain, using lunar regolith stimulant. The use of simulated environments for each of their space missions with identical hardware and terrain was a time-honored NASA practice. When a problem developed far off in space, NASA used these environments to grasp the details of the problem and develop responses. By using a twin of the
Apollo
spacecraft, they had been able to mount a successful rescue effort when
Apollo 13
was stricken on its way to the moon. For the Mars Pathfinder rover tests, NASA had built a “Mars garden” based on data collected twenty-one years earlier by the Viking orbiter.

LPL's moon garden was populated with rovers and recharging stations. Progress on the lunar surface was being faithfully replicated. Five minutes later, the scientist was back.

“All vehicles are keeping well clear of the arrays. The landers touched down a safe distance from the panels, so we wouldn't expect to see contamination from that source.”

“Then what did that? There's no wind on the moon. Show me the map.” A view of the garden appeared on Caroline's lenses, with current rover locations and past routes superimposed. The rovers were indeed keeping well clear of the solar power arrays. Lambach had just finished running a calculation of trajectories the regolith might have taken after being kicked up by movement across the surface, but his analysis also indicated that this was not the source of the contamination.

“I don't understand. Did someone…?” Caroline pressed a finger to her chin, lost in thought, then suddenly looked up. “Joe! Get me a smaller-scale map.”

“A standard surface map?”

“No, something that includes the Japanese base. There's one on their website. I want to see the two maps superimposed.”

Lambach downloaded Sixth Continent's map and resized it to mate with the map of Liberty Island. When the controllers saw the result on the monitors, the room fell silent.

“When the hell did they do this?”

Sixth Continent was under construction on the Earth-facing side of Eden Crater. Since the moon maintained one face toward Earth, a base built on that side would have a fixed sight line for communications.

But NASA faced the same constraints. To harvest Eden's ice, they would have to source power from outside the crater, and unless they deployed multiple communications satellites in polar orbit, they would have to build on the side facing Earth. This meant that Liberty Island and Sixth Continent would have to be relatively close to each other.

The problem was, how close? The merged map showed that the distance between Sixth Continent and Liberty Island had shrunk to a mere two hundred meters. To make things worse, the closest modules to Sixth Continent were Caroline's five solar arrays.

“It was them! Their operations sprayed regolith onto our site! They contaminated our array and shut down our power. Didn't they notice they were doing this?”

“When we deployed the panels, Sixth Continent was at least a kilometer away.” Lambach traced a line on the map with his finger. Caroline nodded.

“I know. That's why we figured it would be safe to put the arrays there. There was nothing on their website about plans to build any closer.”

“At the time, no. Siting a permanent landing area depends on the terrain. They can't make a final decision till they've been working on the surface for a while.”

“Great. So all they thought about was picking a spot where their own arrays wouldn't be contaminated, and they put their landing area right next to us.”

“Not exactly. We didn't notice they were so close. They probably didn't notice either. No one's using IFF transponders up there. As far as the Japanese are concerned, our rovers could be terrain features. And vice versa.”

“This is all academic. They created the problem. We're going to lodge a complaint—” Caroline paused, took a deep breath, and counted to five.

“But…before we do that, we need to think of a solution.”

“Anger management?” said Lambach.

“I'm trying. I can't afford to do anything hasty on this project.”

For Caroline, being tapped to direct unmanned operations on the surface—in effect, to be Liberty Island's Phase One administrator—was a huge professional coup. The reason for her selection was, of course, NASA's change in direction: the Mars project had suddenly been replaced by a lunar research base. In the process, the head of the Mars faction had lost influence. Caroline, whose support for the moon faction within NASA had relegated her to a subordinate role, suddenly found herself in the spotlight.

Caroline was well aware that her promotion was based on chance political developments. She did not want to lose her composure. That would only prompt people to doubt her abilities.

“Those panels were designed for Mars. All we did was change the power settings. Mars has sandstorms, so Wolf's team must've planned for contamination. What was the recovery protocol?”

“The assumption was that the panels would be scoured by the same sand that contaminated them. In the Martian ops plan, the panels were to be oriented at the optimum angle to promote autodecontamination.”

“So what are the odds that our panels might decontaminate the same way? They're within ten degrees of vertical. Couldn't the regolith just drop off?”

This was a question with no easy answer. Caroline put out calls to LPL and research facilities across the United States. The answers came from NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and from Northrop Grumman in New York.

Glenn Research Center had the world's largest space environment simulation chamber, and their staff had deep experience in the effects of exposure to vacuum conditions. GRC's response: friction between regolith particles thrown up from the surface had probably generated a static charge, causing them to stick to each other. The charge would persist in the airless environment.

Northrop Grumman's response came from a staff member who had worked on the design and construction of Apollo lunar landing modules. The smallest regolith particles were as fine as flour. In the moon's one-sixth gravity, there was little chance they would drop off the panels of their own weight. The astronauts who walked on the moon couldn't prevent regolith from contaminating the O-rings on their EVA suits. This prevented them from removing their suits inside their lander, and after lifting off from the surface they had to struggle to avoid carrying dust particles into the command module. The only way to decontaminate the panels would be to have a human on scene to dislodge the regolith by pounding on the rear of the panels.

Caroline was hardly surprised by this analysis, but she had still hoped a solution might be found. Now that hope had been dashed.

“Back to square one,” she said with a sigh. She bit her lip in frustration but wasn't ready to give up. As Grumman had noted, with humans on-site there would be any number of options for removing the regolith. Simply waiting for Liberty Island's manned phase would solve the problem. The overall project would be delayed, not stopped.

Still, she wanted to solve this immediately if at all possible.

NASA's members were steeped in the legacy of their predecessors, whose originality, ingenuity, and adaptability had enabled them to resuscitate dying probes in the far reaches of space. If Method A was unsuccessful, they tried Method B or C. If those didn't work, they kept searching, racking their brains until they found a way. This unshakable determination had come to be known as “the right stuff.” NASA owned it, and Caroline was a rightful heir to that legacy. She thought she had it; she hoped she did.

The next step was a brainstorming call between her staff in the Unmanned Operations Support Room and personnel from a cross section of other departments in JPL. Several solutions were proposed and immediately shot down. Use the minirover that deployed the arrays to shake off the regolith? The rover was not designed to perform gyrating motion or finely calibrated acceleration/deceleration. Proposal rejected. Try the same thing with one of the transport rovers? Too much power. The rover would probably topple the panels, and it lacked sensors to warn when that was about to happen. Proposal rejected. Haul one of the landers to the array location and use its small amount of remaining propellant to direct a blast of thrust at the panels? With no atmosphere, the force of the thrust stream would be very hard to calibrate. If the engine were fired too close to the arrays, it would destroy them. Proposal rejected. Alternate joule heating with radiative cooling by applying intermittent current to the panels, causing the surface to expand and contract? Excessive current could overheat the distribution circuits. In any case, there was no power source. Proposal rejected.

“This is not acceptable. Come on, people! This is NASA!”

Silence descended on the conference. Finally Lambach spoke. “Carol, there is a way. It's very simple.”

“Then why hasn't someone proposed it?”

“Because we're NASA. Because we want to solve this on our own. The solution I'm talking about is right next door.”

“I see.” Caroline was silent for a moment. “The Japanese. You want to ask them to solve the problem for us.”

“Yes,” said Lambach quietly. “Their multidozers are capable of shaking our arrays without knocking them over. Of course, their equipment was built to completely different specifications. The problem we're facing doesn't allow for much direct human intervention. We'll have to leave it to the AI, and that makes it even more challenging. But it's not impossible if we share data. And one of the guys at Johnson told me
Frontier
helped them on one of their missions. If we bring that into the discussion—”