Had an alarm this morning, while Kate and I were off duty at the hab. The dual-auger hit a weak point and sank through what must have been a hard but thin layer of icy regolith. Our survey data didn’t reflect any such thing, and the geology experts didn’t predict a cavity like that. So we’ll be sending them all the data we have so they can model it as a future contingency.
Yukito and Eddie had one CEHV out at the solar farm, and Al and Diana had the other out at the boneyard. So Kate and I brought the old Agency [tooltip tip=”LER: Lunar Expedition Rover” term=”LER”] and rigged up the dozer to help drag the auger free. One of the bits had some minor damage, but otherwise, everything was safe. The cavity only went a few feet below the surface. Still, that puts us on notice that patches that look really good might actually be too good to be true.
Kate guided me from the ridge as I worked the LER and dozer in tandem. Trouble was, the dozer’s auto-pilot programming was being ornery. It thought it knew better. But that only tells me it’s never done anything like pull a jeep out of mud on a steep mountain trail in a typhoon.
Once I got the dozer to see things my way, freeing the rig was relatively easy, considering we had utterly no plan for such a thing. We even got the damaged auger bit repaired before Al got out there. Good thing we’re ready for anything.