Warm Hands, Cold Heart

The initial scans of Rhea suggested that moon was almost entirely composed of ice, mixed with rock into a kind of celestial snowball. The lack of internal heating from a molten core meant that there was no volcanic activity, so the surface remained largely unchanged apart from the action of meteor impacts. Rhea, like its sister moons Dione and Tethys, was tidally locked towards Saturn. One side permanently looked towards Saturn whilst the other was shrouded in night. Nascha Anishinaabe had selected an equitorial region for the initial probe landing, the small package of instruments had touched down on the frozen surface and had immediately began to relay back readings from its sensor array. But this wasn't enough for the impatient astrogeologist, to be so close to the moons surface and unable to touch it was tantalising. The minimal gravity would make a manned excursion extremely hazardous, but the remotely operated manipulator vehicle would make an ideal substitute. Nascha and chief pilot Tom Dachron had separated one of the mobile laboratory units from the Heimdall and Nascha directed the manipulator or 'claw' as Tom brought the lab as close to the surface as he could manage while establishing orbit. Nascha brought the Claw lower and lower towards the pitted surface of Rhea, whilst it was not an ideal surface to land on, she was going to try and obtain a sample using the Claws' projectile coring mechanism. Gently, she guided the Claw to within a few meters of the surface, hovering over a comparatively smooth area. The coring device was a tethered, rocket powered drill which would be fired down into the ice to recover a large chunk of material. Nascha selected a spot which glittered brightly in Saturns light and thumbed the release. The image on the screen jolted slightly as the recoil from the explosive charge shook the Claw slightly, then a cloud of bright particles sleeted in all directions as the drill hit home. She activated the coring head and the device edged itself into the crust of Rhea, drilling down a further metre into the deeper ice. After a few minutes it reached maximum depth and Nascha activated the thermal coils around the barrel to help free the drill and then began to rewind the tether, hauling back the drill and its ice core.

Some hours later, after the lab and manipulator had docked with the main ship again and the initial scans of the samples had been made, Nascha was able to examine the cores directly. In the lab, suited and protected from the icy core, she looked at the long cylinder of material, spotted and flecked with tiny grains of grit, rock and dirt. The core had been taken from the upper edge of Rhean crust, so the majority of the material contained in the ice would be from meteor impacts and Nascha was keen to see what the grit contained. Under microscopic evaluation, she could see the fractures and cracks in the ice and the paths the fragments of meterorite had briefly carved into the surface before the -240 degrees fahrenheit cold had frozen over once more, trapping the particles like flies in prehistoric amber.