BOUNDARY(39)

He checked the disposition of the Faeries. Ariel was very close to the surface of Phobos, no more than a mile off. The other probes had stopped about six or seven miles away and were bracketing the nearly fourteen-mile-long moon in a designed attempt to ensure that no point on Phobos' surface would go unmapped.



"Okay, let's get fancier."



A.J. considered the arsenal of sensors at his disposal. The Faeries were, in some ways, the most advanced instrumentation packages ever constructed, and they had an awful lot to offer. The primary modality on Earth was sight, so naturally the Faeries were well equipped with cameras. Visible light, ultraviolet and infrared—with their optics sealed between synthetic diamond windows for protection.



Unfortunately, the real detail he needed—down to a foot or less—he couldn't get at this distance. With a field of vision of only sixty degrees, he wasn't going to get much better than five feet or so, even with interpolation and super-resolution tricks. Narrower FOVs would have been better, but the tradeoffs involved had torpedoed that. He'd even had the engineers try a synthetic FOV approach, but that ran into problems with light-gathering capability which would take too long to solve.



"If only I could use something with decent resolution," he muttered, not for the first time.



The problem was an old one, dating back to the onset of space exploration. There was almost always a big lag between what technology could do on the surface and what you could get to work up there, with the radiation, vacuum, and other things to cope with. The gap had only gotten bigger in the last decade or so, because with most of the advances hinging on how much smaller and more efficient they could make the gadgets, they'd been getting progressively more sensitive to minor problems.



Tons of minor problems were pretty much what space handed you all the time. Cosmic rays, outgassing from vacuum, the list went on and on. And there was no corner store on the way to pick up a replacement. That meant that you couldn't afford to use something that wasn't fully space qualified on an interplanetary voyage. For a jump to orbit and back down, maybe, but not across a hundred million miles.



So, for the Faeries, A.J. was stuck with something not much better than he could've gotten on the street twenty years ago. Barely twenty-five megapixels in the visible, and worse in the IR and UV spectra.



But there was no point regretting the inevitable. A.J. had IR— near, mid, and far—along with visible and three UV bands. He had GPR, which would certainly be needed. Other frequencies of radio might prove useful, especially if he used the X-ray approach—have one transmitting and the other receiving. Measurement of heat signatures and any chemical emissions would be vital. If there were major caverns or differing composition beneath the surface—which did, as suspected, seem to be covered with about a meter of regolith—the heat absorption and radiation should show some differing patterns.



The other real bottleneck was data transmission. Even with all the advances made in other technology, the speed of data transmission from miniature sensor craft like the Faeries was only slightly better than that from old dial-up modems. That meant that most processing had to be done on the Faeries. Even one full-size image would take a significant time to send. And this was even though they were relaying through a separate satellite, put there by NASA a few years back, which had as its sole purpose being a communications facilitator.



The Faeries were advanced. Still, as they had to be space qualified, small, and mobile, their CPUs didn't have anything even vaguely like the power of current processors. With the transmission limitations, they couldn't send back too much data to be analyzed. That had to be reserved for truly unique work.



Both Tinkerbell and Rane's chemical sensing arrays were showing some water spikes. It was time to try mapping that out and see if he could get some idea as to where the outgassing was coming from.



It took another hour or so to figure out the optimal search pattern to cover with all sensors, and to ascertain the parameters of the low-power ion burns that each Faerie would have to perform in order to fly that pattern. Finally he was satisfied with the layout of search and sent out the directives. That, of course, triggered a slow-motion acknowledge-repeat-confirm cycle to ensure that all the directions had gotten through and were properly understood. Another hour later, he sent the final "go" confirmation.



He was tempted to go back to Elemental Flame, but there was business-related e-mail to answer and other work to do. And this part of the work would take a while.





A few hours later, the alert pinged in his ear, letting him know that he was receiving data from the completion of his survey pattern. He stretched and dropped the cubicle.