To The Andromeda-Ch 1- A New World
It's been two years since I started my mission in 2126 to explore the stars, actually to explore further than that. My name is Mark and I have traveled away from our galaxy more than any other person. The mission given to me was to visit the Andromeda Galaxy, the closest galaxy to the Milky Way. I will specifically be visiting all of the habitual planets the Petunt Vita spotted from our solar system.
The Petunt Vita is a extremely high powered telescope that was sent up way back in 2089, ten years before I was born. The Vita is what replaced the James Webb Space Telescope, and the JWST came after the Hubble. All of them were before my time. These telescopes looked at the stars nebulas and many other things, but the Vita started to stare at planets to see if they could hold life. Now it is my job to find life and see if people could live on these alien planets.
The traveling that I have gone through is quite a strange experience though. My view was once dominated by my home galaxy, but slowly it has grown smaller and smaller. Now all I can see is the Andromeda. It's quite beautiful, but I miss my own home. My traveling time is a mere 5 months until I'm at the edge of the strange galaxy.
Luckily I'm not alone up here. It took a lot of convincing to get NASA to let me bring him along, but they sympathized with me and let me bring Jack along since they didn't want other people to come. Jack was my dog that I have had for only 5 years, but I still see him as a cute little husky puppy. He is very playful and he always sleeps next to my bed. Since he is covered in his thick coat of grey and white fur, I lower the temperature a little in the life support cabin for him, I'm always wearing a jump suit so I'm warm enough.
As far as I know, space technology has sped up extraordinarily in the last 100 years. Faster than light travel or "warp speed",the most cliched name, was made and the human race immediately started to spread out in the Milky Way. They went to all of the planets that the Vita saw fit for life. Forms of plant life and small animal life was found, but nothing intelligent.
Me and Jack were kind of like Lewis and Clark and we are exploring the new land for the people that will settle there. The problem was that some of the Andromeda planets could have changed dramatically in 2.5 million years. My ship is not equip to see if they still are habitable from a distance, a huge telescope would have been too much for it.
For now we just wait for our arrival at the approaching galaxy.
*****
Only one more week until we get there, and the sight is breathtaking. The spiral galaxy before me is sparkling brightly with vast amounts of stars, and I'm heading right for them. I've set course for the first planet the Vita spotted. Can't remember its name... All it was were a whole bunch of numbers and a few letters.
Looking at it from not to far away with my low-power telescope, that I do have on board, it seems white, much different than what the Vita saw. Then again, it could just have been light reflecting off an ocean it had. Which is probably what happened, I can only assume.
*****
Well, me and Jack are here and, how do I put this... The whole planet is iced over, it seems like it entered a ice age. Only little parts of the surface don't have ice on them. I'm pretty sure that there was little life left on the planet. Any way we are going to continue on to the planet AJ-94847, I found the name of the new world in my computer's database. I should be there in 3 days time, it's not to far away.
*****
I'm mapping out some orbital paths for our arrival. This is because I can see that the planet will be abundant with life already. I can't wait to see how this will turn out! It will be the first planet I will find for people to live on. When I get into orbit I'll test the atmosphere to see if it has a suitable amount of oxygen.
After a finished all of the planning, I got up from the one person cockpit and walked along the short hall where Jack was lying down in his little bed next to mine.
"Hey my good boy." I said to Jack.
His ears perked up and he jumped up with excitement. He then preceded to run right over to me and prop his paws up on my thighs, waiting for me to pet him. Reaching out to pet behind his ears, I thought about how long I must have been in the enclosed room planning for my arrival. Just thinking about all the calculations I had to do made me weary.
"How about we get some more shut eye?"
The dog tilted its head in confusion, but he started to understand when he saw me going to bed. I then pulled the covers up to my face, while at the same time he spun around and finally laid down.
I was going to try to get as much sleep I could before I went to work. There would be much more studying to do quite soon.
*****
My eyes slowly opened as I was pulled back into reality from my sleep. I pulled up my hands to my face and rubbed the sleep from my eyes, and yawned. Suddenly my stomach growled loudly and I felt the pain of hunger. I slowly sat up and awoke Jack from the noise I made. He then looked at me, he must have also been hungry.
Me and my pup walked down the hall to the kitchen where all of my cooking was done. The vegetables and some of my oxygen came from a hydroponics room. The rest of my food was packed and stored away for me to access on my journey.
I prepared myself something to eat, and sat down and watched Jack munch away at his kibble. As I sat there eating I decided I would go check on all of the equipment today. After all it had been sitting doing nothing for the past 2 years. I stood up once I finished eating and walked to the end of the small room until I reached the door that lead to the next wing on the star ship I was on. I wanted to make sure the door was secure so Jack would not get in , I didn't want him following me here.
There I stood in the spacious room with shelves of tools, mini probes, satellite communications, space suits and much more, all of it was strapped down tight.
I was going to look at some of the stuff I may need to use, and make sure it is fully operational. If not I could just scan it, figure out what the problem is then use the Replicator to create the part I need to replace. The Replicator was quite handy it made things almost instantly and if I could not figure out how to put something together it would do it for me. It used raw material to create objects and parts, materials such as iron, copper, plastic, and sometimes glass. It seemed like these things never run out, because the ship had a immense supply of these things.
The one thing I was most conserved about was the atmospheric probe. It was miniature and its only propose was to give me extremely accurate readings of the contents of the gaseous atmosphere and then slam into the ground destroying it into hundreds of pieces.
If there was a suitable atmosphere I may even visit the surface of the new world and take some samples of the plant life I saw there. I'm kind of excited, I can't wait!
*****
My orbital burn is approaching and my vessel is very close to the planet now. The burn should only take seconds, I had shut down four of the six warp engines onboard. The other two engines were rotated 180 degrees and trust at max power for a few days now.
I then took hold of the Ion Propulsion joysticks, the mini ion engines acted like RCS did over a hundred years ago. Using the joysticks, I slowly spun my ship around so it no longer was facing the prograde of my orbital path, but instead the front of the ship now faced the retrograde. The four warp engines now faced the prograde ready to throttle up.
I was quickly approaching the dark side of the planet. I reached my hand over and flicked the engines on for only a few seconds, then shut them down almost as if nothing happened.
I glance at my computer guidance and saw it showing a stable orbit at 95 thousand meters around the entire planet. Then I took a long look at the beautiful planet below, or at what wasn't covered by darkness. The continents it housed we nothing like the ones on Earth, not like they were supposed to be the same. I counted two continents from what I could see at the moment. Of those two they were full of green with vast oceans beside them.
Wanting a better view, I took hold of the two Ion joysticks and spun the ship around until it was facing directly at the planet. I sat there for a about 20 minutes until almost all of the planet was blanketed in sunlight. I spun around and faced the open door of the control room.
"Hey Jack get in here!" I said loudly.
Slowly the pitter-patter of his claws clicking on the linoleum became louder as he ran from my room to the control room. Right then he rounded the corner and entered into the room. I patted my lap with my hands and he hopped on my legs. I then rotated the chair around until I was once again facing the huge planet in from of us.
"Is it not one of the most beautiful things you have ever seen?" I asked.
In response he turned his head to look at me, then promptly licked my face.
"Ah! Gross!" I said jokingly as I dried my face.
I then ushered him off me so I could get back to work. I then grabbed hold of a monitor and touched its screen to pull up a camera feed from the left side of the ship. On the screen it showed the deployment bay.i then gave the command for it to launch one of the atmospheric probes I had loaded into the bay earlier. A ten second countdown appeared, and at the end of the counting a saw the probe fly out of the side of my ship. They flew with a high velocity so they would de-orbit Very fast.
I watched the display as it began to show me readings on the atmosphere below us. It first gave me stats on the mesosphere, then it fell about another 30 kilometers next it hit the stratosphere. The speakers started to beep warning me of the heat the thing was going through. Apparently there was more oxygen below me than there was on Earth. Soon the probe reached the troposphere and showed me what a needed to know. The percentages showed telling that there was 26% oxygen, 72% nitrogen, and about 1% of other gases. I now knew that I could go down there if I wanted to, because the planet was almost identical to Earth.
Now that the probe served its purpose, I waited for it to impact with the ground.
10 kilometers
9,
8,
7,
6,
5,
4,
3,
2,
1-
The altimeter stopped.
"What the hell?"
I looked at the temperature readings only to find out it was cooling down. It no longer was at extreme temps but now it just showed a mere 250 Fahrenheit.
Slowly the altitude started to rise and I noticed it moving north towards what looked like a mountainside. It finally stopped at about 780 meters for whatever reason.
"Ok..."
I walked off for a while thinking up every possible possible solution as to why it could have happened, when it finally came to me.
"Ah-Ha! Why didn't I think of this before?"
I ran over to the ships on onboard sensor controls and ran a scan for heat signatures. The program loaded and scanned for a few seconds, and what I saw amazed me.
There were heat signatures, each large cluster of heat was a simple power grid, and. The probe was smack in the middle of one of the clusters too. That means that there is intelligent life below me! Oh my God! I could barely contain my excitement as I picked up Jack and hugged him.
"This is awesome!"
I sat down with Jack again on my lap, and had one good laugh of joy before all hell broke loose.
Author's Note
For those of you who don't know the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years away from the Petunt Vita. So planets could have changed in that many years time, and Mark's trip only took two and a half years to actually get there... He is going pretty fast. Do the math if you wish
To the Andromeda -Ch 2-
All was calm on a peaceful night, nearly everyone had gone to sleep. Except for one pony.
Luna sat on the balcony that overlooked all of Canterlot and Ponyvile, but she wasn't out there to admire the beauty of it all. She was outside because she felt something out of place in her night.
She scanned the sky trying to figure out what was disturbing her when she noticed a shooting star moving downward towards the south. Luna then looked away because it seemed to have burned up in the atmosphere. A few seconds passed before she looked back and saw the same shooting star, it was now glowing red and moving at incredible speeds.
The "star" was on a collision with the outskirts of Ponyvile.
Luna stood there is shock as the hot debris reached the speed of sound and sent out a loud boom that was surely going to wake up most of the peaceful town that was below.
the shock wave was what finally woke up Luna. She then charged up a high power levitation spell, lowering her head she shot the spell directly at the hot mass. The spell flew though the air at an extreme speed, and immediately stopped the object only hundreds of feet above the town. Luna then teleported to herself to examine it. Right then the hot circular object slammed down in front of here still smoking.
The ball started to burn a small indentation in the wooden floor as it cooled down. Luna then picked up the small sphere once it had cooled down for a closer examination. It looked like a ball of tungsten, the same stuff that was in some light bulbs. Also it appeared to have a small opening in the the top. Running out of ideas Luna then decided it would be best that she gave it to scientists in the morning because she was sure some of them may be curious what woke them up at 5 o'clock.
After Luna set the object back down she walked out again to scan the sky once more. After only looking for a few seconds she spotted what looked like another "shooting star" in the sky.
"Oh no, not again." Luna said with stern voice "You are not hurting my subjects!"
She then shot out another high power levitation spell to pull the "star" in, but it was much larger that she originally thought. So she charged up even more power and on that note she yanked on it with a strong force and stopped whatever orbit it was in. That's all that it took because gravity nearly did the rest, all she needed to do was put it some where where it wouldn't hurt anypony, and all should be fine. Until it fought back.
