Mars, to Greeks

Usage examples of ares.

There were scraps of notes, from the crew to themselves, and emergency checklists, and hundreds of tiny round-cornered squares of blue Velcro stuck to the walls.

The clouds thickened toward the equator, and when she looked ahead, tangential to the Earth's surface, she could see them climbing up into the atmosphere, as if Ares was heading for a wall of vapor.

The brief burns were placing Ares on segments of successively wider orbits.

The supplementary tanks carried more than two million pounds of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, propellant Ares would need to break clear of Earth orbit.

The rest of the Ares stack—the Mission Module, MEM, and Apollo—would be docked onto the front of the MS-IVB to complete the assembly of the first Mars ship, a needle well over three hundred feet long.

Later in the mission—when Ares had burned off its fuel, reducing its mass—the acceleration of the MS-II would be a lot tougher.

It was all to drum up interest and enthusiasm for Ares, to allow the great American public to see what they were paying for.

She could hear the hum and whir of the Mission Module's equipment, and the occasional automatic burn of the attitude clusters as they kept Ares pointing sunward.

The lox tank was used to hold stores, and with its thicker walls it would serve as the crew's storm shelter—shielding them from solar flares, if any blew up in the course of the mission.

And the top level, closest to the prow of the Ares cluster, was the Science Platform.

There was a scheme to observe major solar events like spots and flAres from the two widely separate vantage points of Ares and Earth, and so there was a whole bunch of instruments which would be directed at the sun: a coronagraph, a spectroheliograph, a spectrographic telescope.

Since in flight the Ares cluster would keep itself aligned to point at the sun, to save boiloff, all the equipment was mounted in a pallet, which would be unfolded and held out from the body of the Mission Module, like a rearview mirror.

The models Ares was carrying were out-of-date: the design of the platform, already nearly a decade old, had become frozen around those customized, low-weight, low-power machines years before.

Inside the sphere of influence, Ares had essentially been in an orbit dominated by Earth.

The trajectory planners back in Houston had sent corrective burn parameters chattering up the line to Ares, and the MS-II stage's maneuvering propulsion system—two modified Lunar Module engines—had applied a hefty velocity change of twenty-five feet per second.