After all that physical labor, I deserved a break. I rifled through Johanssen’s computer today and found an endless supply of digital books. Looks like she’s a big fan of Agatha Christie. The Beatles, Christie… I guess she’s an Anglophile or something.

I remember liking Hercule Poirot TV specials back when I was a kid. I’ll start with The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Looks like that’s the first one.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 66

The time has come (ominous musical crescendo) for some missions!

NASA gets to name their missions after gods and stuff, so why can’t I? Henceforth, rover experimental missions will be “Sirius” missions. Get it? Dogs? Well if you don’t, fuck you.

Sirius 1 will be tomorrow.

The mission: Start with fully charged batteries and solar cells on the roof, drive until I run out of power, and see how far I get.

I won’t be an idiot. I’m not driving directly away from the Hab. I’ll drive a half-kilometer stretch, back and forth. I’ll be within a short walk of home at all times.

Tonight, I’ll charge up both batteries so I can be ready for a little test drive tomorrow. I estimate three and a half hours of driving, so I’ll need to bring fresh CO₂ filters. And, with the heater off, I’ll wear three layers of clothes.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 67

Sirius 1 is complete!

More accurately, Sirius 1 was aborted after one hour. I guess you could call it a “failure,” but I prefer the term “learning experience.”

Things started out fine. I drove to a nice flat spot a kilometer from the Hab, then started going back and forth over a 500-meter stretch.

I quickly realized this would be a crappy test. After a few laps, I had compressed the soil enough to have a solid path. Nice, hard ground, which makes for abnormally high energy efficiency. Nothing like it would be on a long trip.

So I shook it up a bit. I drove around randomly, making sure to stay within a kilometer of the Hab. A much more realistic test.

After an hour, things started to get cold. And I mean really cold.

The rover’s always cold when you first get in it. When you haven’t disabled the heater, it warms up right away. I expected it to be cold, but Jesus Christ!

I was fine for a while. My own body heat plus three layers of clothing kept me warm, and the rover’s insulation is top-notch. The heat that escaped my body just warmed up the interior. But there’s no such thing as perfect insulation, and eventually the heat left to the great outdoors, while I got colder and colder.

Within an hour, I was chattering and numb. Enough was enough. There’s no way I could do a long trip like this.

Turning the heater on, I drove straight back to the Hab.

Once I got home, I sulked for a while. All my brilliant plans foiled by thermodynamics. Damn you, Entropy!