I hopped in the rover and drove it downhill, dragging the trailer with me. As I’d hoped, the trailer nosed into the hole and tipped up. From there, it fell onto its wheels with a huge plume of dust.

Then I sat for a moment, dumbstruck that my plan had actually worked.

And now I’m out of daylight again. I can’t wait to get out of this damn shadow. All I need is one day of driving toward the MAV and I’ll be away from the wall. But for now it’s another early night.

I’ll spend tonight without the trailer to manage my life support. It may be righted, but I have no idea if the shit inside still works. The rover still has ample supplies for me.

I’ll spend the rest of the evening enjoying a potato. And by “enjoying” I mean “hating so much I want to kill people.”

LOG ENTRY: SOL 501

I started the day with some nothin’ tea. Nothin’ tea is easy to make. First, get some hot water, then add nothin’. I experimented with potato skin tea a few weeks ago. The less said about that the better.

I ventured into the trailer today. Not an easy task. It’s pretty cramped in there; I had to leave my EVA suit in the airlock.

The first thing I noticed was that it was really hot inside. It took me a few minutes to work out why.

The atmospheric regulator was still in perfect working order, but it had nothing to do. Without being connected to the rover, it no longer had my CO₂ production to deal with. The atmosphere in the trailer was perfect—why change anything?

With no regulation necessary, the air was not being pumped out to the AREC for freeze-separation. And thus it wasn’t coming back in as a liquid in need of heating.

But remember, the RTG gives off heat all the time. You can’t stop it. So the heat just built up. Eventually, things reached a balance point where the heat bled through the hull as fast as the RTG could add it. If you’re curious, that balance point was a sweltering 41°C.

I did a full diagnostic on the regulator and the oxygenator, and I’m happy to report both are working perfectly.

The RTG’s water tank was empty, which is no surprise. It has an open top, not intended to be turned upside down. The floor of the trailer has a lot of puddled water that took me quite a while to sop up with my jumpsuit. I topped the tank off with some more water from a sealed container that I’d stored in the trailer earlier. Remember, I need that water to have something for the returning air to bubble through. That’s my heating system.

But all things considered, it was good news. The critical components are working fine, and both vehicles are back on their wheels.

The hoses that connected the rover and trailer were designed well, and released without breaking. I simply snapped them back into place and the vehicles were sharing life support again.