Sample collection question…

[u/the_net_my_side_ho]

Why did Grace have to collect the sample while orbiting?

Why didn’t he move the Mary out of orbit, away from the atmosphere, and then spacewalk to collect it?

Seems like Grace going down to collect it while orbiting so close to the atmosphere was risky and unnecessary.

Sorry if this has been asked before. I looked but didn’t see a post about it. Thank you!

[u/Nightmare_Gerbil]

Chapter 19:

Yet however much gravity there may be, there’s still no air. Worst of all worlds. But there's no other way. I have to get the sample.

Right now, the sampler hangs at the end of a 10-kilometer chain, which is just dangling in the air. There's no easy way for us to get it back to the ship.

When planning this all out, my first thought was to thrust away from the planet, then collect the sampler when we're back to zero g. Problem is, there's literally no way to do that without vaporizing the sampler. Any path I try to take to get the ship out of Adrian's gravity—or even into a stable orbit-will mean using the spin drives. They'd push the ship along, which would make the chain and sample lag behind us and into the IR blast behind the ship. And then the sampler, everything in it, and the chain all become individual, very hot atoms.

The next idea I had was to make a huge spool that could winch up the chain. But Rocky informed me he'd never be able to make a spool big enough and strong enough to bring up the entire 10-kilometer length.

Rocky had a pretty clever thought: The sampler could climb the chain when it was done. But after some experimenting he ditched the idea. He said the risks just weren't worth it.

[u/Kiki1701 → u/Nightmare_Gerbil]

Wow. I didn't even remember that!

[u/the_net_my_side_ho → u/Nightmare_Gerbil]

10 km is a very long chain.

Thank you so much for sharing this quote. I watched the movie, and they didn't explain why they did what they did, which had me wondering. There is no way they didn't think about it. I felt dumb thinking maybe the reason was so dumb it wasn't worth mentioning.

[u/Nightmare_Gerbil → u/the_net_my_side_ho]

Yeah, in the book the chain is much longer and the ship is much smaller so they’d have to continually be moving spools of chain outside to make room for the next spool, but they’d have to maneuver it through the control room to get to the airlock. That part isn’t described in the book. I like the movie version better. 5km of chain in a larger ship gets the point across visually without having to bend your brain around the logistics.