'Ding! You have mail!' The annoying chime inside the helmet of my Lunar Excursion Suit disturbed my contemplation of the sight of the sun going down over the horizon signalling the start of a month of lunar night. The stars, un-twinkling in the vacuum, became clear in the instant after sunset, no twilight on the moon. The temperature began to drop as well and my suit coolers responded and began running in heating mode. I would have to start the short walk back to the new European Space Agency Lunar Observatory before I got too cold. For the next month we would be using suits with augmented heaters.
As I walked I touched the keypad on the arm of my suit and brought up the e-mail headers on my heads-up display. It was from the Public Relations department of ESA and titled 'Christmas'. Well that was just over a month away. Whatever it was could wait until I was back at my desk inside the observatory.
As it happened I forgot all about the e-mail for a few days as other high priority tasks claimed all my attention. The lunar night was the busiest time for the astronomers at the observatory and we engineers were consequently run off our feet with requests from the astronomers for repairs and adjustments to their equipment. When things settled down I started going through my accumulated emails and finally came across the one from PR.
I am not sure what the people working in PR had been smoking but this idea was one of the oddest that I had come across for a long time. In order to keep the public aware, interested and supportive of our work up here they had come up with a publicity stunt. Years ago, when lighthouses back on Earth were manned, it became a tradition for local air forces to fly a special Christmas helicopter sortie to remote lighthouses and bring them a Christmas Tree and presents. The PR department had arranged for a special automated Russian supply ship to deliver a Christmas Tree and decorations to us on the moon. The Norwegian government had supplied the tree, the Irish government were sending hand blown lead crystal baubles, tinsel was coming from Germany, candles from Italy, lights from France, the list went on and on. PR would produce a video sequence about the preparations on Earth, all we had to do was set up a live video feed of the tree in place on Christmas Eve which incidentally would be just about lunar sunrise and together they would go out to news programmes worldwide.
To start with everything went so smoothly I stopped worrying about it. The supply ship launched on time, came into lunar orbit, landed exactly between the radar reflectors a safe distance from the observatory. Our low-loader went out and picked up the pressurised container and brought it into the vehicle airlock and then we man-handled the container into the mess hall and opened it up. The lovely smell of the pine tree inside filled the mess hall as we opened packages of decorations, stood the tree up in its tub and started dressing it. It looked magnificent and we even started singing impromptu carols as we gathered for our main meal of the day.
It was then that the stations air quality alarms went off. Klaxons and voice warnings of a volatile chemical release. We all grabbed the emergency re-breathers we carried at times and pulled them on as we headed for our muster points. My place was at the control room and I queried the computer for more details of the nature of the chemical release. The automated GCMS (gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer) identified it as a mixture of terpenes. I shut down the automated alarms and went onto the PA system and announced that it was OK to stand down from the alert. It was the oils from the pine that we were smelling that had set off the alarms when it spread away from the mess hall. No need to worry, we could programme the system to ignore those.
I woke in my bed several hours later with a headache to another set of air quality alarms, this time the automated voice said high carbon dioxide and lowered oxygen levels. Still groggy I pulled on the re-breather and took a few breaths and felt better, this was no false alarm. In the control room the 'night' shift were puzzling over displays. Something had caused our photosynthetic algal and hydroponic gas recycling systems to slow down conversion of carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen. The lights in the tanks and chambers were working normally, powered by the fusion reactor sited in a crater a few miles away. Nutrient and water levels were correct. It was just something was slowing down the reaction. We scratched our heads, made calls to Earth, searched databases. It was one of the biologists that realised what the problem was. It was those terpenes from the pine tree, they ware acting as an airborne herbicide. We had to get that tree out of the station, and fast while we scrubbed the terpenes out of the air.
It took 4 of us to man-handle the tree into the vehicle airlock and onto the low loader. Two of us quickly donned our heated excursion suits while the others ran back into the station and hit the emergency decompression button, that was a mistake. Crystal glass baubles full of air at Earth pressure act like mini hand grenades when suddenly put into a vacuum. We moved very carefully and dusted the broken glass shards off our suits and the seats of the low loader, one tear in a suit and we would be in serious trouble. I radioed the control room and asked for a clean-up crew to deal with the airlock before we came back in from placing the tree outside. We could always fix up some baubles and video it outside for the PR department.
You might think that was the end of our troubles. You would be mistaken. After a few hours of sleep I was woken again by a call from the control room. Could I come and take a look at the external video feed of the tree. Something did not look right. I assumed it was because they were looking at the tree using infra-red. We try and avoid using visible light outside the observatory during the lunar night, the whole point of being here is that it is dark. We don't even get earth light as we are positioned just over the horizon from the part of the moon visible from earth.
It was not the infra-red view that was the problem. No it was more mundane that that. You all know what happens when a Christmas tree dries out. The needles fall off. We had a nude Christmas tree, freeze dried needles lay all around it. Not very impressive and only two days to go before show time.
While the engineers worked on making aluminium baubles and anodising them in different colours any astronomers who were at a loose end were set to work cutting out leaf shapes from the metal foil heat insulation we used around the station.
So it was that as the sun rose on the moon on Christmas Eve a shiny metallic tree stood on the lunar surface with the observatory in the background while we sang carols inside our suits and sent the video back to Earth.
As I walked back to the observatory I was thinking how glad I was this was all over. 'Ding! You have mail!'. Hmm - it was from the PR department titled 'Valentines' ....
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