Re: Arkadia System/Vilis (0407) Date: 234-1107 17:55
The outermost moon is small and bright. A shade over 195 km in diameter, with a high albedo that makes it shine across most of the visual spectrum.
Conrad's new course brings the two ships in close, less than twenty klicks above the surface, both of them moving backwards, against the full thrust of their main engines, as they try to slow down for a better look, attempting to match the highly eccentric orbit of the tiny moonlet.
From that height, it looks even more like a snowball. Spectrographic analysis confirms it. Mostly water ice, with impurities. Surface gravity is only 0.01 G, and the temperature on the sunside is a balmy -130°C. Not even athe faintest whisp of atmosphere, though there is a slow moving cloud of ice particles around it.
The surface is cratered, and split by cracks. One of those craters is almost forty kilometres wide, and at the bottom of that lays the metal object. It looks like a ship, though it is crumpled, crushed, and broken beyond repair. Partly buried in the ice, it seems to match the original estimate which placed it at about a hundred metres long...
Jockram's voice crackles over the tightbeam, "Looks like those stories about a lost ship might have been based in fact."
This message was last updated by the GM at 12:58, Sat 02 Dec 2006.