I got a lot of thinking done.

I can make everything better by having more solar panels. The fourteen panels I took to Pathfinder provided the 18 kilowatt-hours that the batteries could store. When traveling, I stowed the panels on the roof. The trailer gives me room to store another seven (half of its roof will be missing because of the hole I’m cutting in it).

This trip’s power needs will be driven by the oxygenator. It all comes down to how much power I can give that greedy little bastard in a single sol. I want to minimize how often I have days with no travel. The more juice I can give the oxygenator, the more oxygen it’ll liberate, and the longer I can go between those “air sols.”

Let’s get greedy. Let’s say I can find a home for fourteen more panels instead of seven. Not sure how to do that, but let’s say I can. That would give me thirty-six pirate-ninjas to work with, which would net me five sols of oxygen per air sol. I’d only have to stop once per five sols. That’s much more reasonable.

Plus, if I can arrange battery storage for the extra power, I could drive 100 kilometers per sol! Easier said than done, though. That extra 18 kilowatt-hours of storage will be tough. I’ll have to take two of the Hab’s 9-kilowatt-hour fuel cells and load them onto the rover or trailer. They aren’t like the rover’s batteries; they’re not small or portable. They’re light enough, but they’re pretty big. I may have to attach them to the outside hull, and that would eat into my solar cell storage.

One hundred kilometers per sol is pretty optimistic. But let’s say I could make 90 kilometers per sol, stopping every fifth sol to reclaim oxygen. I’d get there in forty-five sols. That would be sweet!

In other news, it occurred to me that NASA is probably shitting bricks. They’re watching me with satellites and haven’t seen me come out of the Hab for six days. With my back better, it was time to drop them a line.

I headed out for an EVA. This time, being very careful while lugging rocks around, I spelled out a Morse code message: “INJURED BACK. BETTER NOW. CONTINUING ROVER MODS.”

That was enough physical labor for today. I don’t want to overdo it.

Think I’ll have a bath.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 208

Today, it was time to experiment with the panels.

First, I put the Hab on low-power mode: no internal lights, all nonessential systems offline, all internal heating suspended. I’d be outside most of the day anyway.

Then I detached twenty-eight panels from the solar farm and dragged them to the rover. I spent four hours stacking them this way and that. The poor rover looked like the Beverly Hillbillies truck. Nothing I did worked.

The only way to get all twenty-eight on the roof was to make stacks so high they’d fall off the first time I turned. If I lashed them together, they’d fall off as a unit. If I found a way to attach them perfectly to the rover, the rover would tip. I didn’t even bother to test. It was obvious by looking, and I didn’t want to break anything.