Salvage operation

It has been a while since I made a spacewalk outside of the pod.  

With the ice storms subsiding now that the season is over, we ventured out on the asteroid's surface. The Monastery itself has artificial gravity inside, but once you leave though the airlock, this quickly dissipates. Moving away from the installation, the gravity reduces until you barely feel it is there. 

The jagged horizon encloses you, and its curvature is clearly visible since the rock is not that big - the perspectives seem all wrong. The surface is frozen, but it is not like usual ice or snow, it is much more dilute, powdery and fluffy, and walking is awkward. We took out a large salvage vehicle, which looks more like a big cage on spikey wheels - traction control is difficult even on the usual regolith of the asteroid. There is no real sense of speed, as you have with planetary vehicles, or perhaps there is some feeling but it betrays you. 

Everything is very very quiet - the rock does not have any atmosphere.

We moved to the sunny side and crossing the from the darker to the lighter region is a brutal attack on the senses. Even the combination of the helmet's adaptive visor and vision implants has a difficult task to find a setting that does not blind you with light, nor with darkness. The white cover is thicker here - the ice particles are carried by the solar wind so the side that is more exposed to the star is more thickly covered.

We made it to the crashes shuttle without any problems, and started with checking that there are indeed no life signs. There would not be ones, since an entire side of the shuttle is missing. We did not find a corpse, whatever happened to the pilot of the shuttle - or perhaps it was on autopilot - is a mystery until we read out the navigation computer, or what is left of it.

We removed whatever pieces and parts we could - lifting even big masses does not require much effort in this weak gravity. But the work is slow, and clumsy, as you are most of the time moving yourself in stead of the mass when you try to push or pull, there is little grip. In the end most pieces were removed, and the crash site is left relatively clean. 

Now the task of sifting through the salvage to find out more about it begins.