Tidix-c II Airtime

Ziggy’s antennae twitched as they walked onto Tidix-c II.

It had been a while since they’d visited this moon. They’d visited Tidix-c earlier to check up on the mining facility, but this was their first visit to Tidix-c II since that was built. It still looked very similarly to how they remembered it - it wasn’t as if the building of a mining facility would change the entire environment overnight - but it felt just slightly different. As if when they were gone, the grass kept growing without them.

It was strange. Familiar, but different enough to feel like everything had changed.

That was okay, though. They were used to the feeling. It happened often when in this kind of situation - going from planet to planet, studying things. Coming back to see how things have changed while you were gone was half of the job.

Today, however, they were here to check up on something of particular importance. They wanted to make sure that the air quality of Tidix-c II had degraded since the construction of that mine.

It was one of the many concerns there were about constructing a mine on Tidix-c. As Tidix-c II was a moon, there weren’t as many concerns as there were the actual planet, but the concept of air quality was brought up in quite a few discussions. Even though most pollutants would limit themselves to Tidix-c’s atmosphere, and the mine itself was doing its best to ensure that it would release minimal environmental impact, but it was still something everyone agreed was best double and triple checked first.

They brought quite a few tools to help measure the quality. Most were just simple air quality monitors - however, they made sure that each one detected different types of pollutants in the air. This was to make sure they could tell which pollutant specifically was present, if one machine marked as extremely low air quality, while the others marked it as perfectly fine.

They are also taking a more low-tech test with as well - a few papers, with petroleum jelly coating it. They had left a few in different areas back home - and they were planning on bringing these to different areas of this moon.

These papers, hopefully, would collect any potential smoke or soot flying around in the air. This would help provide a visual aid for the numerical data they would be collecting later. These papers would be hung in the biomes for one week, with more than one present at each location to help account for any extraneous circumstances or outliers. They wouldn’t want an entire experiment jeopardize just because an animal was curious!

They took a deep breath, setting the stage for the experiments they were about to do. It would take quite a bit of travel to all the locations they wanted to study, but it would be worth it to make sure that this moon was still sustainable!

They began to set up their gear, thinking that right where they landed would be a great spot to conduct their first test…