41 minutes later we were gathered around the satellite terminal to see if he had a arrived safely.
The reading on the screen showed three blips. The asteroid, the bus, and the craft. So we knew the craft had arrived safely. Unfortunately we had no means to communicate with the craft, so we would have to wait and watch it's movement to determine if the captain was alright.
I asked the crew to busy themselves by trying to further document the machine. I told them that this information was going to be very valuable when we returned home. A sad attempt at raising moral.
A few hours later we returned to the terminal to see if there was a change. We had already configured the computer to show the asteroids original path in red, and its new path in blue. We immediately fast forwarded the current sequence of events to view Terra Duorum and see if the path would still intersect with it in the future.
The path had definitely changed, we were relieved that the captain was still alive. He had obviously done a fairly good job of maintaining his distance and gradually moving away from the asteroid to use his gravitation field like a tractor beam. It would still hit the planet, but it was getter closer to avoiding it altogether.
He would have to continue to work at changing its path, although his craft had some pull, it was much smaller than the asteroid. Hopfully in the following weeks he could change the path enough to miss the Terra Duorum but not so much that he couldn't find his way back again.
In the next week we would have a better idea of what was going to happen.
