That was, of course, the main purpose of the whole exercise: to survey Phobos with an accuracy and detail never before attempted, including interior imaging if possible, so that the best location for the Phobos Base could be determined.
"Once the data really starts flowing, no one bother me. I'm putting my earphones on now." He suited action to words, and the exuberant sounds of Tenkuken's Battle for Heaven blotted out any possibility of being interrupted short of someone physically poking him.
The latter would also be difficult as he had now brought up a temporary cubicle. That minimized disturbance in both directions, since it not only prevented people from casually walking up to him to ask questions, but also screened him from view and at least partially from hearing. A.J. had a habit of talking to himself or playing VR games while waiting for the next round of Real Work. It was only a matter of courtesy to try to minimize the amount of such antics his co-workers were exposed to.
Initial GPR data was starting to come in from Tinkerbell and Sugarplum. That was what he was currently interested in, but he left the feed from Titania and Rane up so that anyone interested could track Pirate's progress.
Excellent, the returns were coming in loud and clear from Phobos. It wouldn't be too long before he could start building up an idea of what he had there. Surprisingly, he was actually getting some usable returns coming back from Mars. Well, with the lowest orbit of a natural satellite known—less than six thousand kilometers—he wasn't trying to scan from nearly as far out as he would otherwise. He stored that data for later analysis; it wasn't part of the main project.
A shadowy image began to build up on his VRD. Phobos' density was known to be very low—not even high enough to be mostly carbonaceous rock. The moonlet's composition was a mixture of rock and ice, or it had large hollows inside. Either was a fairly likely possibility. The theory was that both Phobos and Deimos were captured outer-system bodies, possibly "burned out" comets or something similar.
Privately, A.J. had bet himself that it was a combination—there would be some hollows, and some ice as well. The latter was close to being a sucker bet, as some probes, notably the ill-fated Soviet Phobos probes of the late twentieth century, had actually detected some water outgassing from the little moon.
The GPR probes were slowly gathering enough data to start generating a 3-D model of Phobos. The moonlet was roughly oval in shape, with the giant ten-kilometer crater Stickney showing how close the little moon had come to being shattered eons ago. The model was slowly solidifying. Now it was a cloud of gray with just tantalizing hints of structure, but as time went on, he was sure he'd get more out of it.
Looking at the rest of the feeds, it was clear that he wouldn't have much to do—even just on the thinking end—for another half-hour at least, maybe more. So he keyed the system up to do alerts only when various tasks were complete, and logged on to the Elemental Flame VRRPG (Virtual Reality Role Playing Game) server net.
After about an hour with no particular alerts from the system,
A.J. switched over for a glance. What he saw caused his character Severn Four-Winds to exclaim "What the hell is that?" This necessitated some out-of-character explanation and a quick log-off.
"What is that?" he asked himself again.
The 3-D model of the miniature moon had become much more solidly detailed, since its ghostly first appearance of an hour or so ago. But the details that could be made out were . . .
Peculiar, to say the least. Some areas of the interior were blank, as though the GPR waves couldn't penetrate. That was pretty odd given what was normally required to screen out radar waves. There were rounded and blocky outlines, long curving lines seeming to radiate out from various points, and things that appeared to be hollows of a wide, flat nature.
A.J. started talking to himself. "Hmm. Well, this is over near Stickney. Result of collision? Maybe. It does radiate outward. I wonder if the other radiative areas coincide with impact events. It's the blank areas that are really funny."
A.J. wasn't really that knowledgeable with regard to astrogeological dynamics, but to his untutored eye it looked like half-melted conglomerate with crystal inclusions.
"Which, come to think of it, might not be far from the truth," he muttered. "If the things were outer-system, they must've been something like comets, so parts would certainly be melting at perihelion. And they'd be moving so fast that normally they couldn't be captured by something as small as Mars. So maybe they hit something—something that caused serious melting. Hmm . . . maybe . . . what if Deimos hit Phobos, or something like that? I'll have to get one of the orbital mechanics guys to model it. How fast would these things be moving if they came in from outsystem, and what would it take to get them captured by Mars?"