They had already found, charted and photographed the two small moons that circled the planet. One of these was fairly large—about nine hundred miles in diameter, and the other much smaller, about a hundred and fifty. Three, itself, was about five thousand miles through.
"There are clouds down there," Jak called suddenly as they approached ever nearer at constantly decreasing speed.
"Yes, I see them."
"And there's a big ocean!" Their mother was equally excited.
"Three's only about thirty million farther away than Two, although on the opposite side of the sun right now. So there shouldn't be too much difference, except Three'll be colder," Jon stated. "We're about a hundred miles up now, so I'm throwing us into a descending spiral."
"There's a big mountain range, and some of the peaks are snow-covered," Jak called out a few minutes later.
"I see them. We're down to about twenty miles now, and I'm setting a crisscross orbit for two or three revolutions to get a better view and take our first pictures. Mom, if you can tear yourself away, I'm hungry."
She stepped back from the screen, laughing. "You're always hungry." Then she glanced at her wrist-chronom and gasped in dismay. "No wonder—it's over an hour past lunchtime!"
"We'll yell if anything especially interesting shows up," Jak called as she was leaving.
By circling the planet from east to west they kept to the daylight side most of the time, and as the hours passed they were able to get most of their pictures and reports on the geography, climate and other conditions. Their spectro-analyzer showed considerable mineral deposits in many of the places over which they passed.