The Martian

“What about the MAV?” I hear you ask (in my fevered imagination). “Won’t it have some supplies? Air and water at the very least?”

Nope. It’s got dick-all.

It does have air tanks, but they’re empty. An Ares mission needs lots of O₂, N₂ and water anyway. Why send more with the MAV? Easier to have the crew top off the MAV from the Hab. Fortunately for my crewmates, the mission plan had Martinez fill the MAV tanks on Sol 1.

The flyby is on Sol 549, so I’ll need to leave by 449. That gives me 257 sols to get my shit in gear.

Seems like a long time, doesn’t it?

In that time, I need to modify the rover to carry the Atmospheric Regulator, Oxygenator, and Water Reclaimer. I call them “The Big Three”. All three need to be in the pressurized area, but the rover isn’t big enough. All three need to be running at all times, but the rover’s batteries can’t handle that load for long.

The rover will also need to carry all my food, water, solar cells, extra battery, my tools, some spare parts, and Pathfinder. As my sole means of communication with NASA, Pathfinder gets to ride on the roof, Granny Clampett style.

I have a lot of problems to solve, but I have a lot of smart people to solve them. Pretty much the whole planet Earth.

NASA is still working on the details, but the idea is to use both rovers. One to drive around, the other to act as a trailer for all the shit I have to bring.

I’ll have to make structural changes to that trailer. And by “structural changes” I mean “cut a big hole in the hull.” Then I can move the Big Three in and use Hab canvas to loosely cover the hole. It’ll balloon out when I pressurize the rover, but it’ll hold.

How will I cut a big chunk out of a rover’s hull? I’ll let my lovely assistant Venkat Kapoor explain further:

[14:38] JPL: I’m sure you’re wondering how to cut a hole in the rover.

Our experiments show a rock sample drill can get through the hull. Wear and tear on the bit is minimal (rocks are harder than carbon composite). You can cut holes in a line, then chisel out the remaining chunks between them.

I hope you like drilling. The drill bit is 1cm wide, the holes will be 0.5cm apart, and the length of the total cut is 11.4m. That’s 760 holes. And each one takes 160 seconds to drill.

Problem: The drills weren’t designed for construction projects. They were intended for quick rock samples. The batteries only last 240 seconds. You do have two drills, but you’d still only get 3 holes done before needing to recharge. And recharging takes 41 minutes.

That’s 173 hours of work, limited to 8 EVA hours per day. That’s 21 days of drilling, and that’s just too long. All our other ideas hinge on this cut working. If it doesn’t, we need time to come up with new ones.

So we want you to wire a drill directly to Hab power.

The drill expects 28.8V and pulls 9 Amps. The only lines that can handle that are the rover recharge lines. They’re 36V, 10A max. Since you have two, we’re comfortable with you modifying one.

We’ll send you instructions on how to step down the voltage and put a new breaker in the line, but I’m sure you already know how.

I’ll be playing with high voltage power tomorrow. Can’t imagine anything going wrong with that!

LOG ENTRY: SOL 193

I managed to not kill myself today, even though I was working with high voltage. Well, it’s not as exciting as all that. I disconnected the line before I fucked with it.

As instructed, I turned a rover charging cable into a drill power source. Getting the voltage was a simple matter of adding resistors, which my electronics kit has in abundance.