21:00 It was time for Valerie and Brandon to go on duty with Tom and Sally heading for their respective staterooms and sacking out. Jackie and Carl are coming off duty and now have some time to grab a snack, relax, read, or be shutterbugs as Earth and Luna slowly rotates past the port and starboard portholes. It’s called free time, so what they decide to do is up to them. However, the view of the two familiar heavenly bodies is changing rapidly. Already, it is necessary to look toward the rear of the craft to see them, as Bolo One corkscrews its way through space.
Brandon takes the first watch at the flight control console on the bridge, as Valerie heads up to the Hydroponics Station on the third deck. She will trade places with him in four hours. There really isn’t a whole lot to do on the bridge or much one can do if something were to cross their path unexpectedly. The early warning system would sound the alarm via an ear piercing, ‘Brace for impact!!!’ in an otherwise polite British accent.
A stationary object might be avoided with fast reflexes on the control stick, but there aren’t very many stationary objects in deep space. The more likely scenario is encountering something orbiting the sun in an orbit between Earth and Mars. If this object were coming at Bolo One head on or passing through the solar system at a right angle, there wouldn’t be much time to dodge it. That’s just one of the risks the crew knew they might have to face when signing on.
There has never been a robotic probe lost en route to Mars due to an impact. Human error in the planning, on the other hand, is another thing all together, causing the failure of the 1999 NASA Mars Climate Orbiter. This Mars satellite was lost due to ground based computer software, which produced thruster output in English units of pound-seconds (lbf-s) instead of the design specification requirements of metric units in Newton-seconds (N-s). As a result, the craft encountered the Martian atmosphere at too steep of an angle and disintegrated.