Down? Yes.
Out? No way.
Even if it turns out to only be 50 words today, it will be 50 more than I had yesterday.
While I normally put in a lot of internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be this year’s thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rhea was an icy cue ball hanging below them, no longer a dot or far distant orb, but a world now. The surface not only was smooth in comparison to the rocky worlds of the solar system, but it was smooth compared to the other ice moons. Still, having kilometer deep craters and ridges in the frozen surface still meant a landscape unlike anything ever explored in person before.
Now in orbit around Rhea, Cronus had dropped two robot probes down to the surface. The first had gone onto the floor of the biggest crater on the moon, Tirawa, which had a tall, irregular central spire. The second had gone down onto one of the wide plains of ice, dotted with millions of small, shallow craters.
Both were having some problems learning to move around. With a surface gravity only 1/37th of Earth, it was as big of a decrease from the Moon’s gravity to Rhea’s as the Moon’s gravity was compared to Earth. With such low gravity and an extremely icy and slick surface, wheeled transport would have been extremely difficult.
Instead, something completely novel had been cooked up before Cronus had left Ceres. The probes designed for use on the icy moons were equipped with L-shaped appendages that could serve as either skis or snow shoes. On hard ice they would turn the ski surface downward, while on any puffy or powdery surface they could rotate their “feet” to have the showshoe side down.
That would let them move around, but didn’t give them a means of locomotion or a way to stay in one place if the terrain wanted to slide them somewhere else. Wanting to not re-invent the wheel, the mission engineers had found a way to let the probes anchor themselves and then move slowly and securely, just like it would be done by ice climbers on Earth.
Three arms on each lander were tipped with sharp pitons. Any one of the arms was enough to hold the probe on anything but the most extreme slopes, but with all three anchored the probes were solid as rock. The pitons could be heated slightly to facilitate their burial into the ice or their removal from it. When the average temperature at noon was −200 °C, it didn’t take much .
In order to move, the landers were equipped with three systems for deploying ropes and hooks, then reeling them in. The thin but strong lines could shoot an anchor up to 100 meters away, allowing the probe to slide itself along the line. To go across an area at an angle, a second or third anchor could be set. By reeling in lines and letting line out with others, it was hoped that the probes could move about fairly easily, if not quickly.
Nuclear powered and ruggedly built, the probes’ large central bodies, the way they were supported off the ground by a tripod of metal, steel-tipped legs, and the way they moved by shooting out lines and then scooting along them quickly earned them the name of “spiders.”
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 