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12

Only half a kilometer distant now, the gray edifice of asteroid RQ39 loomed above the Jiangs like a mountain. Still confined to their spacecraft, the Jiangs could only see what their portholes’ limited fields of view allowed. Two pairs of “panoramic” windows on opposite sides of their inflatable hab module—each sixteen inches square, practically picture windows for their purposes—offered better viewing angles. With their craft parked at one end of the oblong object, Max and Jasmine each hovered by one of the big windows but not so far apart that they couldn’t still hold hands. Each squeezed the other’s excitedly. When Max turned to his wife, her face was beaming.

“Do you see that cliff face?” she asked, an apt if not a strictly accurate description for such a feature. Along one side of the asteroid, nearly a third of its surface was scalloped with deep grooves.

Max pressed his face against the window, looking up to where his wife was pointing. “Spectacular! It’s like Half Dome in Yosemite.”

“It looks more recent than the other features,” she said, remembering that they were recording their observations for posterity. “Less impact erosion.”

“You’re right. For whatever meaning ‘recent’ might have here,” he agreed. “This body could easily be five billion years old. Part of it must have broken off.”

“My body feels almost that old sometimes,” she joked, “but I haven’t broken off any parts yet.”

“Very funny, my dear. It could be promising. If this was once a larger body that somehow sheared in two, then it could give us a better sense of what’s inside than any of our other instruments.”

“That would be fortunate,” she said. “Other than our magnetometer, I still can’t get anything useful beyond visible spectrum. Even the CubeSats we deployed are sending back nothing but static.”

“Still nothing from Palmdale?”

“They can’t find anything wrong with our onboard sensing equipment or the CubeSats. Frustrating.” She pointed at the window. “It’s something environmental out there. There’s no ionizing radiation, no decay that would account for it. Perhaps it is a very dense iron core as you suspected, a giant magnet.”

“With a large piece of the asteroid cleaved away, exposing more of the core? That might explain it.” He continued to stare outside. “It is indeed a strange universe God has made for us. Ready to go see a piece of it?”


“It feels like I’m staring at the heights of Everest from base camp,” Max said, standing atop the sled that housed their in situ resource experiment. Free of their spacecraft and able to take in its totality up close, he felt remarkably small.

“Perhaps you will be able to do that one day as well.” His love of geology and mineral exploration, besides making them wealthy, had created opportunities they’d never anticipated. Whether climbing rock faces or descending into caves, he had learned to embrace risks others wouldn’t. And she was steadfastly at his side for all of it. But this was a particularly sore subject with them—Everest’s summit straddled Nepal’s border with China, exposing them to an entirely different kind of peril.

“One day, perhaps,” he sighed. “Coming here was easier, I think.”

The asteroid looked like a mountain, untethered from Earth and floating free in the void. Eroded outlines of impact craters beneath a loosely pebbled crust hinted at eons of bombardment from other, smaller bodies it had encountered through its endless voyage around the Sun.

After they each clipped their maneuvering units to opposite sides of the sled, Max reached down for its release lever. He glanced across at his wife. “Ready?”

Jasmine nodded nervously from behind her visor.

“We will be fine, my dear. Let the computer do the work, just like we practiced.”

He tapped a command into a wrist-mounted computer. After a five-second count, compressed-gas jets in their backpacks fired in unison to pull them free of Prospector. Concentric circles appeared in each of their visors, projecting the path Max’s guidance computer had calculated to take them to their desired landing spot on RQ39, a bright region where subsurface water ice was suspected. He tapped in another command to execute, and their backpacks fired once more. The computer guided their way across the half-kilometer divide, adjusting their path with coordinated bursts of control jets.

The floating mountain grew as they approached, showing more surface detail with each passing minute. It had a grainy texture, like a layer of gravel. Some areas had been scoured away by long-ago impacts, revealing smooth rock beneath.

Closer they drew, until rock was all they could see. As their shadows seemed to converge, the computer fired a final, forward burst to slow them just a meter shy of the surface. They descended slowly, the barest hint of gravity pulling them the rest of the way. He could feel the thud of the heavy ISRU sled through his boots as they touched down as one, a thin cloud of gravel scattering in all directions.

They absorbed the gentle impact through their knees before reaction could send them back into space. Grapplers from the sled automatically deployed when they sensed the sudden change in inertia, securing it to the surface.

As the dust settled, Max looked across at his wife, beaming just as she had when they first saw Malati up close yesterday. Neither spoke, and by the look on her face he could tell she was just as amazed that they’d made it. Her hand reached for his, clumsily gripping it through pressurized gloves.

Max drew in a breath to calm himself before speaking to the world. “Palmdale,” he said, “we have arrived on Malati.”


Transcript from the Global News Network

“Today’s spacewalk on asteroid 2023 RQ39, now informally named Malati, will be the first and shortest of three planned extravehicular activities, or EVAs, over the next week while the Prospector spacecraft remains in close proximity. After that time, they will perform a short correction burn and their orbits will begin to diverge as Prospector continues on to its flyby of Mars.

“GNN is privileged to be the first to interview civilian astronauts Max and Jasmine Jiang on the surface of Malati from the Prospector Foundation’s mission control in Palmdale, California. Light delays have been edited for time.

“Mr. and Mrs. Jiang, how are you? Could you describe your experience so far?”

Max: “We’re doing quite well, thank you, Kevin. I suppose the best way to describe our experience is ‘alien,’ not to put too fine a point on it. It’s surreal. If I turn one way I’m staring into deep space at so many stars it makes me dizzy. Eventually I’m able to pick out the blue Earth, even though we are several million kilometers from home. But then if I turn the opposite way, facing Malati’s surface, it all seems familiar. If you’ve ever been climbing, it’s not unlike the scree you might find on the slope of a mountain. The ground beneath us is bedrock with a fairly thick coating of loose gravel, though it doesn’t behave like gravel would on Earth.”

Jasmine: “If you follow my helmet camera, you’ll see static electricity causes the smaller bits to cling to our boots. That’s because this asteroid’s gravity is perhaps a hundredth of Earth’s. It’s really not enough to stand on.”

“We can see that. Moving around on a body that small must be challenging. Are you afraid of falling off?”

Jasmine: “It feels as if we could fall off with every turn. Whichever direction you look, you’re seeing the edge of Malati. It’s not like a horizon in the sense you would think of it on Earth, or even the Moon. Here, we could fly out into space if we pushed hard enough. We have to keep ourselves tethered to pitons we drove into the surface in the same way one might use them mountain climbing.” [Pauses] “But mountains are more of my husband’s area of expertise.”

“And what about your experiment package? Does it need to be lashed to the surface as well?”

Max: “The In Situ Resource Unit is on a maneuvering sled with pneumatic bolts that secure it to the surface. Once it begins drilling, the shaft will be more than enough to keep it anchored.”

“What do you expect to find there?”

Max: “King Solomon’s Gold. Maybe D. B. Cooper’s money.” [Laughs] “Seriously, that’s an interesting question. Malati is an interesting place. It has characteristics of both Class-C and Class-M asteroids. We have already detected water ice below the surface, as we’re finding is more common on carbonaceous Class-C bodies. But there is a large area that appears to have been cleaved off in the past, which may have exposed a number of Class-M rare-earth minerals.”

“Does that make Malati a good candidate for an asteroid-capture mission? Somehow bring it to Earth?”

Max: [Laughs] “Not in our lifetimes, it’s far too big. It’s ten miles across at its widest point. By the time we’ve developed the technology to do something like that, we probably wouldn’t need it.”


“I don’t know how you do it, love,” Jasmine said back aboard Prospector. They had just finished watching the replay of their interview after stowing their suits and cleaning up. “I don’t have the patience for those inane questions. I have an easier time talking to grade schoolers.”

“You are, in a sense,” Max said as he hovered over the ISRU display. “They’ll probably rebroadcast that to classrooms. And you were splendid demonstrating the low gravity, by the way.”

“I didn’t feel splendid,” she said. “I’m not good at aiming for the lowest common denominator. Its awkward.”

“Yet that’s precisely the right tactic. Remember, statistically half the population is by definition of below-average intelligence.”

She closed her eyes and smiled. “How can such a cynic be so good at handling interviews?”

“Precisely because I am a cynic, dear. Now, look at these preliminaries.” He moved aside to let her see the returns from Malati’s surface.

She slipped on a pair of reading glasses that had been pushed back on her head. “That’s—amazing. Is that what I think it is?”

“Hydrogen and oxygen,” he said, triumphantly folding his arms. “Water ice extracted from just beneath the surface and electrolyzed into its component elements.”

“How much already?” she said, squinting at the figures. They looked impossibly good.

“It’s already filled one O2 bottle,” he said. “The hydrogen is taking longer. Haven’t really solved the boiloff problem but we can see the process works.”

“Still, that’s an excellent start.” She beamed at her husband. “It makes the trip worth it.”

“It wasn’t already?”

She was about to level him with a cutting rejoinder when the master alarm began blaring. “What was that?”


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