The Earth-Mars Chronicles Book Series

Rolf was slightly startled at the soft chime from his computer. In over six years of scheduling time on various telescopes to conduct his searches, he had only heard that sound twice before. Both had been false alarms. His hopes swelled. His brain said, "Probably another false alarm," but his pulse began to race a little. He sat down at the old wooden desk that was one of the few pieces of furniture in his meager apartment and keyed the display to life, immediately switching from 3D to 2D mode. He set the temple contacts in place over his head and commanded a display of the frames of superimposed data that had set off the alert.

And there it was. The short string of pixels that constituted something reflecting or emitting light in the 300-700 nanometer bands and without the relative motion of a star or planet. A few years ago it would have shown up as a single dim pixel, raising more questions than answers. Major advances in imaging sensitivity and resolution, coupled with signal processing and image analysis, made it possible to extract data beyond what was once held as "theoretical limits." However, Rolf needed a second recording consistent with the first before he could approach one of his volunteer colleagues for independent verification. He always scheduled three consecutive nights of observation to cover such contingencies, so tomorrow night would tell the tale. There was a lot to do before then.

He dug into the fundamental data, looking at every detail; non-uniformity corrections, uncorrected and processed signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), regression analysis on all surrounding pixels, and everything else he could think of. Everything checked out. He hardly slept the rest of the night, waiting for his time on the telescope to come. He marveled that he could sit in his little apartment in Sweden and have real time access to a first-class telescope a quarter of the planet away via a link connection with near infinite bandwidth. That was an exaggeration, of course, but the access to everything was so nearly instantaneous that the concept of bandwidth was pretty much meaningless...

Their Mars landing craft had to do it the hard way. Jerry Dean knew that it would be easier for the settlers who would follow, when fuel was plentiful and the new generation of habitat landing craft was available. But now it was hard.

Jerry knew hard. He was past 54 now and knew he was neither bulletproof nor invincible. Were it not for intense dedication, modern medical science and his powers of persuasion, he probably would have been deemed unfit for this mission. Margeret had been killed in a car wreck in 2046, two days before their planned wedding. After he crawled out of too many bottles of Makers Mark fine whiskey he walked into a suit of steel will. No one fought harder or worked longer hours to make Earth defense and Mars settlements happen. No one. He had eventually let another wonderful creature inside of his carbon fiber reinforced universe, but only when he decided that he was strong enough to take a chance on suffering that wall of pain again. Ruth had been standing beside him ever since, and she would be coming to Mars to join him. Jerry Dean smiled at the thought, resisting the urge to bring her picture up in the corner of his virt-vu display.

There were no windows in their landing craft. That human idiosyncrasy in U.S. spacecraft that began with the Mercury capsules finally gave way to progress and all of the Alliance spacecraft had 3D virtual view (virt-vu) imaging presented to each occupant as well as to the support functionaries on Earth, albeit with over five minutes of delay due to the speed of light limitation on electromagnetic propagation. Jerry could instantly command any view available outside the craft or inside the craft, including multiple simultaneous views. He chose the nadir view directly below and adjusted the field-of-view and magnification. They were gliding silently over Solis Planum according to Jerry’s ground track display, headed toward Valles Marineris, the largest known canyon in the solar system. They were moving from southwest to northeast and would make one more orbit around the dull-colored planet below as their craft aligned itself for the entry into the very thin (by Earth standards) atmosphere of Mars. Even though the atmospheric pressure at the surface of the red planet was significantly less than 1% of the Earth’s, it was still quite "deep" and would become noticeable even at 100 km altitude. There was nothing for Jerry and his five crewmember companions to do but wait...