The Astronaut's Mom

Letters From Mars, Part 2: What I Do and Why

From: Piper
To: Mom
Subject: What I'm Accomplishing Here
Date: March 30, 2038

I told you I would be talking about my job in my next email, and so that's what I'm going to do. It's kind of a long message, but I ask you to read through the entire thing before you start composing questions.

Anyway, you do know there are currently three working robotic rovers on Mars, the Lewis and Clark, which are privately owned by MSC, and the Curiosity, which is NASA's.

My primary job right now is to run Curiosity. Prior to having humans on Mars, the communication delay prevented us from actually driving them in real time, so the rovers either drove themselves in flat terrain, or the team on Earth had to carefully plan a route using satellite images. They did great work, but it was slow, and they stayed away from any terrain that looked risky. Now that I'm here, I can view the camera feed in real time, drive the rover to the most interesting sites and select samples that I recognize to be promising. I've collected as many samples in the last month as Curiosity would typically have collected in a year, and sampled areas that Curiosity previously could not have entered.

We've also got three drones for recon. They can cover a lot more miles than the rovers, but they can't collect samples, just photos. Flying on Mars is not as easy as on Earth. The thin air doesn't give the same amount of lift, so the drones look really big and bony compared to their Earthly cousins.

Later, we hope to recover and repair the Opportunity and Spirit, which may be as simple as replacing the solar panels and battery packs and upgrading their software and memory.  We'll also be installing expansion ports, to make the rovers customizable. Universities will put together equipment packages and send them to us. We'll plug them into the expansion ports and set them loose. There's a long waiting list of universities wanting to get rover time.

Finally, Sojourner was recovered in '27, but was in rough shape, having been buried for thirty years. Much of it was salvageable, though, so we brought the necessary parts with us for a new Sojourner-class rover, and we're assembling that now. There's an elementary school contest to come up with a name for it. When it's done, it'll be used for Hab inspections and such. It's valuable because it saves us EVA time, which we have to ration.

Speaking of EVA (extra-vehicular activity), you will be glad to know that I have not yet gone outside the Hab. Doc says I haven't sufficiently recovered from the trip out--nothing to worry about, just still adjusting to the return of gravity.

So, that's what I do. I know it's not so much your area of interest, but I'm really proud of it, and it'd be great if you could at least understand why it's important to me.