Aurora by David A. Hardy Page A

phases and set four and a half hours later in the east, to rise again eleven hours afterwards. Then a smaller but brighter star appeared and overtook Phobos. That, she knew, would be their Orbiter, waiting to take them home but meanwhile completing the best high-definition survey of the whole planet ever made, either working autonomously or, if they needed to choose a specific area—preparatory to a ground exploration, for instance—under human guidance.
    Both the orbiting and landing craft had names, as was customary. There had been much argument over them. Gods such as Ares were always warlike, so had been ruled out. Finally, the orbiter was named Schiaparelli and the lander Lowell , after the two early astronomers who had been the most prolific and influential observers of the red planet. True, Lowell had also been responsible for many misconceptions, with his assertion that the canals he claimed to see were artificial watercourses, created by intelligent Martians...but at least he had brought Mars into the public’s awareness, and its imagination. The crew generally ignored these names, however, and rarely called the two craft anything other than Orbiter and Lander.
    The fact that the Orbiter was passing overhead would not prevent Aurora from seeing the other side of the planet in real time. Three small satellites had been placed in strategic orbital positions so that the whole of Mars (apart from small areas around the poles) could be viewed at any time. The satellites also served as communications relays. Unfortunately, one of them had failed to achieve its proper orbit, so there were occasional blind spots. This was not one of them but, even so, not only was the great asteroid-impact basin of Hellas almost certainly obscured by dust but it was currently night on that part of the planet.
    It wasn’t Hellas she wanted to look at anyway. She keyed in the appropriate coordinates and there was the huge, dark cone of Olympus Mons, rising above a sea of ochre suspended dust. From it long dark streaks extended northwards, just as they had in November 1971 when the unmanned Mariner 9 probe first arrived. Already the Big Three volcanoes—Arsia, Pavonis and Ascraeus—could be seen thrusting their peaks above the clouds. Perhaps the planet-wide dust storm was starting to subside, and their expedition could soon start?

NOCTIS LABYRINTHUS
    Aurora stepped down from Rover 2, walked forward a few meters, and looked over the canyon edge. This felt like a school outing, and she could imagine laying out a picnic on the flat area of sand to her right. Spam sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes to eat like an apple; but no one ever remembers the salt.... Hayashi Minako sat on a boulder, assembling an anemometer. Nearby, Bryan Beaumont examined chunks of basalt. Claude Verdet was already a tiny figure in the distance, his long legs letting him bound over boulders and narrow crevices like a mountain goat. Rover 1 was still approaching over the plain of Syria Planum, completing its 700-km journey.
    At first the walls of the canyon dropped steeply, revealing varicolored layers of lava flows, but then the slope became more gradual as banks of talus—debris flaked off over millennia—piled up, leading down to the floor. There were several spots where it would have been quite easy to descend to the sandy bottom. In places the bedrock seemed to be exposed, though it was possible, instead, that large boulders had fallen from above and, partially buried, were mimicking patches of bedrock showing through. That was something for the first traverse to discover. The signs of erosion, presumably by water, were quite clear.
    The big question to be answered was: were there any signs of life down there? The sometime presence of water was beyond doubt. Could there be fossils, no matter how primitive? Or, better still, might there be living organisms? The results from probes like Britain’s Beagle 2 and later unmanned