Die on Mars

Tang Yue wore Mingguang Armor, opened the door of the airlock, and stood the antenna on the ground against the strong wind.

"The antenna is deployed." Tang Yue reported in a deep voice.

"Start retrieving signals." The old cat's voice rang immediately. It was sitting in front of the workbench, and all the computer screens in front of it were on. At this moment, Kunlun Station was like a monitoring center. The system computer here was the latest HP model. The workstation, a special version for Mars mission, is powerful and is a good hand at processing data.

The Eagle spacecraft lost contact one minute after launch. This was obviously due to the weather. When the Kunlun Station was in the low-pressure area of ​​the storm, the radio waves could barely break through the interference, but when the sand and dust carrying a huge amount of charge covered the scientific research station again , the communication power of the Eagle spacecraft is not enough to suppress environmental noise.

The vertical take-off phase of the lander has ended. Vertical lift-off can break through the densest troposphere of the atmosphere at the fastest speed. This altitude is about 20 kilometers. After exceeding this altitude, the Eagle spacecraft will begin to change direction.

The old cat forced himself to remain calm.

In a space launch mission, losing contact is the most frightening thing. At a distance of tens of millions of kilometers, electromagnetic waves take several minutes to travel at the speed of light. In the vast and endless dark space, if you don’t If you actively send out a signal, then no one can find you at all. That invisible, intangible, and extremely fragile communication channel is the only kite line between the spacecraft and the ground, so sometimes losing contact is equivalent to completely missing.

The long silence in the communication channel is like death. In the history of human spaceflight for nearly a hundred years, such silence has appeared many times. Everyone standing in front of the communication system has their heartstrings tightened, but not after every silence. It will all be "I'm out of the cabin and feeling good."

Kunlun Station is still retrieving signals.

Tang Yue acted as the human servo mechanism of the antenna. He slowly adjusted the direction of the antenna.

Time passes minute by minute.

The second minute after the launch of the lander is about to pass. According to the predictions of the Kunlun Station system, if nothing goes wrong, the speed of the lander has increased to two kilometers per second, which is equivalent to six times the hypersonic speed. At the same time, the altitude should have reached 130 kilometers.

But the damn thing is that the old cat can't contact the lander at all.

Without Kunlun standing below and watching, God knows what that naughty kid on the Eagle spacecraft would have done.

Just in case the computer of the Eagle spacecraft had a convulsion and felt that it was too boring to launch according to the preset orbit and could not reflect its strong power, so it decided to make a 360-degree turn for three and a half weeks...

The consequences could be disastrous.

Signal…signal…signal! The old cat gritted his teeth, Damn it, give me a signal! The real-time measurement data on the computer is from one minute ago, and these parameters have not been updated for a minute.

"Old Cat, is there any news?" Tang Yue asked.

"No."

Tang Yue sighed, "Sure enough, children are like this. When they grow up, they leave home and go to a distant place where their parents can't go. They don't reply to a single letter for a long time."

The old cat was startled. Tang Yue's tone made him seem as if he had raised a child, and there was an inexplicable hint of melancholy in his voice.

"For example, me."

Old Mao was stunned for a moment, and then realized that Tang Yue was talking about himself.

"I was watching the Eagle spacecraft launch into the sky, and it gave me such a feeling... The so-called father-daughter, mother-son scene just means that your fate with it is that you will continue to watch its back fade away in this life. It's going further and further away." Tang Yuemo changed Long Yingtai's sentence, "I stood in front of the Kunlun Station and watched it gradually disappear at the top of the atmosphere. Moreover, its back silently told me: there is no need to chase it."

"Chasing? Can you catch up?" The old cat shook his head, "If you have the ability, you can chase someone and let me see."

Ever since he learned that the earth had disappeared, Tang Yue had become more and more like a melancholic poet. He would say a few confusing sentences when he had nothing to do, which made Lao Mao very worried that this person would one day sleep on the train because he couldn't think about it.

"Old Cat, you have been on Mars for so many years and have never returned to Earth. Have you never felt homesick?" Tang Yue then asked, "For example, like Yu Guangzhong's "Nostalgia"... When you grow up, homesickness It’s a small spaceship, I’m on this side, and the earth is on the other side…”

"Homesickness? What do I miss? Do I miss the assembly line in the factory?"

Sometimes Lao Mao still admires Tang Yue.

Although Tang Yue seems to have a somewhat melancholy temperament, in fact he is not the kind of person with truly delicate and sensitive emotions. A real poet would probably choose to commit suicide the moment the earth disappears, to bury hundreds of millions of living beings, which is more of a behavioral art. Maybe they would fill the Kunlun Station with pure oxygen, then set off a big fire, raise their heads and shout loudly: "I am the king of kings! I dare to impress God with my unparalleled achievements!"

But Tang Yue had no such idea at all. He should eat and sleep, and he would not shout Shelley's poems to see Marx. This guy's nerves far exceeded the old cat's imagination. The old cat glanced at Feng Su Yi, the wind speed outside right now is thirty-eight meters per second. On Earth, this kind of wind speed would blow off the roof of your house.

But Tang Yue was talking to it about how the children would never come back when they grew up and about the homesickness in Yu Guangzhong.

Do you think this is emotional delicacy?

Or is there something wrong with your brain?

One hundred and fifty seconds after launch of the lander.

The old cat still can't contact the Eagle spacecraft.

According to the normal launch procedure, the lander will enter the parking orbit two hundred seconds after launch and abandon the first-stage rocket. This is the first step to enter orbit. From launch to rendezvous and docking, the Eagle spacecraft needs to go through three stages. steps, the first of which is to enter the parking orbit.

The perigee of the parking orbit is 150 kilometers and the apogee is 350 kilometers. It is a slightly flattened ellipse.

The Eagle spacecraft will operate in a parking orbit, waiting for the right opportunity. When the opportunity comes, it will accelerate for the first time when it reaches apogee, leave the parking orbit, and enter a parabolic transfer orbit.

Therefore, it is crucial to successfully enter the parking orbit. If the predetermined orbital altitude cannot be reached, the subsequent flight procedures will have to be redesigned. If the situation is worse and the orbital altitude is too low, the lander may even fall back into the parking orbit. The atmosphere burns.

The old cat looked at the timer.

One hundred and sixty seconds after launch, the lander was 220 kilometers above the ground.

There are still forty seconds left before the first stage rocket burns out and breaks away.

"Turn the antenna direction to the east! About thirty degrees!" Old Cat shouted.

"Adjusting." Tang Yue slowly turned the antenna, "How is the boy's condition?"

"I don't know what the situation is..." the old cat replied, "You'd better pray that it can successfully enter the orbit, otherwise your child will probably die outside!"

One hundred and seventy seconds after launch, the lander was 250 kilometers above the ground.

There are still thirty seconds left before the first stage rocket breaks away.