An hour and forty minutes later, after first eating, donning pressure suits and traversing the treacherous descent, Tom and Sally finally attained the crater floor, near the now deceased and mangled rover. They took the next half hour rolling out the sounding gear and testing the apparatus, which appeared to be in good working order. To achieve feedback for the soundings, Tom swung the sledgehammer and struck the terrain several times with great force, each blow causing a small shock wave to ripple downward through the surface. The sensors positioned along the gear’s two cables transmitted data back to the nearby computer being monitored by Sally. As the cables cross in the middle at a 90° angle, this process rendered a three-dimensional view of the subsurface, extending down to a depth of nearly 100 meters.<\/p>\n
“Tom! This is amazing! Come take a look at this!” Sally was very excited after viewing the results. In the Martian gravity of 0.38 of Earth’s, Tom took a few quick steps as he started moving toward her. He found himself approaching Sally so rapidly that he nearly fell over her, while clumsily trying to come to a halt in the somewhat bulky space suit.<\/p>\n
“What is it?” he queried, anxiously.<\/p>\n
“Look at the monitor!” she replied in an unusually high pitch. Tom squinted at the screen for a few moments, then drew back glancing over at Sally.<\/p>\n
“Is that really what it appears to be? Can it be what I think it is?” he asked in astonishment.<\/p>\n
Sally adjusted the output on the front of the display box, “Are you not seeing what I’m seeing?” she questioned.<\/p>\n
“I sure as hell hope so!” he answered, savoring the sight. “Surface looks solid, down about thirty-five meters, then there’s about a five meter void above what looks like, HOLY SHIT, WATER! And it’s… forty meters down to the pool. From there the depth goes… BELOW THE SOUNDINGS!!” Tom hollered loudly in his elation. “That would put it more than sixty meters in depth! Let’s see… that’s 100 x 100 x 60 plus… that’s a fuckin’ lot of water! Plus, we’re just on the edge of the crater! This thing must be… what did we figure, eleven and a half kilometers across? Hey! We’re sitting on top of a volcanic caldera with a huge subsurface lake!” he finished, with a final fist pump in the air.<\/p>\n
“You still think this was a volcano?” Sally backhanded his arm, surprised at his pronouncement of the source.<\/p>\n
“You don’t?” Tom countered, just as surprised. “What else could it be?”<\/p>\n
Sally thought for a moment before responding, “I had originally thought it was a meteor, but all this water means it must have been a comet. Listen,” she said. “We both know a comet is basically a large dirty snowball. So picture a snowball several kilometers in diameter that augured its way into the ground at high speed. The friction of that impact would cause it to start melting, but not before triggered thirty-plus meters of regolith to fall back in on top of it. When it struck Mars, the impact blasted this gigantic crater. Some of its surface material, the ice and hard mineral aggregate gemstone and carbonados got knocked off and landed in the ejecta around the edge of the basin. Then, geothermal heating caused the remainder of the comet to melt and resulted in this enormous underground lake.”<\/p>\n
Sally could see the look of understanding in Tom’s face as she continued with her theory, “I think we will find the perimeter of the lake closely matches the boundary of the crater, pretty well. There will be more diamond crystals unearthed in the soil between here and the water’s surface, but a much larger deposit will be located on the lakebed, assuming the gems were evenly distributed throughout the comet’s ice. Plus, the lack of a well-defined impact lip could be due to the melting of the ice in the ejecta near the rim and the surrounding material collapsing back in upon itself, as the water seeped downward, much like sinkholes on a beach in the spring. By contrast, a volcano would, more likely, have a much higher rim and we would see a lot of galvanization and basalt in the surrounding soil,” She concluded.<\/p>\n
Excellent summation,” Tom declared. “But, ya know what? I think the diamonds are going to turn out to be secondary in importance. The real find here is the water! This means that after we land FP2, we won’t need to transport any more hydrogen to Mars from Earth. So, not only have we found a way to pay for this mission and the next several launches, we’ve also discovered a way to make all future missions less expensive! Of course, the location of the crater may just be coincidental to the water below. The comet, if that’s what it was, may have just punched a hole in the top of an underground ocean.”<\/p>\n
“Isn’t that a kick in the ass?” Brandon commented over their headsets. “This might just rate right up there with the discovery of the Higgs Boson. It should really make the accountants happy and set the powers that be to dancin’ in the aisles,” he enthusiastically shouted, leaping up from his seat at the console.<\/p>\n
“Brandon, how long have you been monitoring this?” Sally queried.<\/p>\n
“Not too long. I tuned in about four or five minutes ago,” he replied. “And I’m gonna put a few bottles of the good stuff on ice, so to speak. Oh, by the way, our next uplink to Mission Support is in two hours, nineteen minutes. Do you two think you’ll be back in here by then to pass on the good news, or would you rather wait for the following uplink, to notify them of your discovery?”<\/p>\n
Tom looked over at the crater wall, considered the trek up to the rim, and then glanced at Sally, “What do you think, two hours and nineteen minutes to make it back inside, or a bit longer? There’s the slope I spotted,” he said pointing north about a hundred and fifty meters.<\/p>\n
In high spirits, Sally jested, “With you climbing up after me and staring at my ass all the way? Yeah, I can make it without breaking a sweat. How about you?” From within her helmet, she favored him with a wink and flashed a smile that could sizzle butter.<\/p>\n
“Just don’t slow down,” Tom warned in return, his own glance warming to her challenge.<\/p>\n
Hearing the lighthearted teasing Brandon again wondered about their future together and commented, “Ok you two, remember that people are listening and innocent ears are a-burnin’.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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