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From there, we took the MDV (Mars Descent Vehicle) to the surface The MDV is basically a big can with soht thrusters and parachutes attached Its sole purpose is to get six hu any of them
And noe co all our shit there in advance
A total of 14 un ould need for surface operations They tried their best to land all the supply vessels in the saood job Supplies aren’t nearly so fragile as huround really hard But they tended to bounce around a lot
Naturally, they didn’t send us to Mars until they’d confirmed all the supplies had made it to the surface and their containers weren’t breached Start to finish, including supply missions, a Mars mission takes about 3 years In fact, there were Ares 3 supplies en route to Mars while the Ares 2 creere on their way home
The most important piece of the advance supplies, of course, was the MAV The “Mars Ascent Vehicle” That was hoould get back to Hermes after surface operations were complete The MAV was soft-landed (as opposed to the balloon bounce-fest the other supplies had) Of course, it was in constant communication with Houston, and if there were any probleo back to Earth without ever landing
The MAV is pretty cool Turns out, through a neat set of cherarah It takes 24before we got here
You can ione
It was a ridiculous sequence of events that led toThen an even
The usts up to 150 kot whacked with 175 kot in our suits and huddled in the middle of the Hab, just in case it lost pressure But the Hab wasn’t the problem
The MAV is a spaceship It has a lot of delicate parts It can put up with storet sandblasted forever After an hour and a half of sustained wind, NASA gave the order to abort Nobody wanted to stop amission after only six days but if the MAV took any et stranded down here
We had to go out in the stor to be risky, but what choice did we have?
Everyone made it but me
Our nals fro torn fro the way, it crashed through the reception antenna array Then one of those long thin antennae slah h butter and I felt the worst pain of uely re the wind knocked out ofpainfully as the pressure of my suit escaped
The last thing I re out toward me
I awoke to the oxygen alar that eventually rouseddie
The storm had abated; I was face down, alily came to, I wondered why I wasn’t more dead
The antenna had enough force to punch through the suit and ot stopped by my pelvis So there was only one hole in the suit (and a hole in me, of course)
I had been knocked back quite a ways and rolled down a steep hill Soly oblique angle that put a lot of torque on the hole in the suit It made a weak seal