Alternative Assessment 1 Goh Ray Wehn

Goh Ray Wehn

S104

Quintessa

Sec 1 Alternative Assessment

         A plethora of planets is scattered throughout the universe, dotting the sky with what seems like fireflies. Man has discovered plenty of these wonderful and mysterious planets, but one of them stands out of them all, Quintessa. This planet looked similar to Earth. But what shocked astronomers was that the planet looked like it contained water! Out of curiosity, National Space Agency (NSA) sent a four-man team of trained and experienced astronauts to Quintessa to explore the planet. But upon landing on Quintessa, the team had lost contact with the Control Centre and was no longer heard of again. 

        Everyone at the NSA was dumbfounded that the astronauts were lost. NSA could not allow the astronauts to remain missing and resolved to send their top team of astronauts,  Joe Bradley, Chase Peterson, and Gwen Watson there to investigate and retrieve the missing team. Was sending another team a bad move? What is going to happen to them?

         Finally, the day had come. “3! 2! 1! LAUNCH OFF!” The newly-built space shuttle launched off. The thrusters propelled the shuttle sky high and lifted the astronauts spirit to cloud nine as they were going back to the boundless three-dimensional extent, space. The newly-built space shuttle was the fastest shuttle ever built. It could travel up to speeds of 72,000 kilometres per hour. The shuttle dodged asteroids, sped past planets, and soon it reached Quintessa.

        The shuttle landed. Joe, Chase and Gwen came out of the shuttle. “Guys, let’s look for the missing team,” Chase instructed the team. “Alright, but if they were around, we should be able to find them by now since we were told that they landed somewhere around here,” replied Gwen as she glanced left and right. “Guys! I found their ship!” Joe exclaimed as he pointed to a small space shuttle not far away.  Joe was physically fit and found his way around the low gravity and became used to it, while the rest were still adapting to the new environment.

        The astronauts leaped towards to space shuttle, using the low gravity to their advantage. They found out that the space ship was damaged and the communications device was torn out. Suddenly,  Joe stepped on something.  Joe looked down to his foot but was aghast to find that it was the corpse of one of the missing astronauts. The other two astronauts found the dead body of the other three missing astronauts. Chase inspected the bodies and found bite marks on each of them. Just then, a swarm of weird-looking beetles climbed out from underneath the rocks and crawled towards the three astronauts. Guessing that it must have been the beetles that have killed the other astronauts,  Joe, Chase and Gwen leaped back to their space shuttle as fast as they could. The beetles were fast crawlers but could not catch up to the astronauts.  Joe, Chase and Gwen started the engine of the shuttle and took off back home. Discovering the existence of a new alien beetle was enough excitement for them for that day. They did not want to have the same outcome as the “no longer missing” astronauts.