Category Archives: Astronomy

Of course, it can be a bit exhausting to spend a full day at the hanger with deadline stuff up the ying-yang and a couple hours of “fun” training on the tugs and forklift thrown in to boot. Especially when I was up until well past midnight last night, writing, so I’m short a couple hours of sleep. And the night before. And the night before that. And… So by the time it comes time to write, staying awake might be the top priority.

You know that I’m tired when it takes me three days to figure out “which day” of NaNoWriMo should be listed in the post title, as if the first day of NaNoWriMo hadn’t been on the first day of November… (I believe that today the correct value is “eleven,” but someone might want to double check my work.

After the first dozen times I find myself nodding off at the keyboard and not knowing if I’ve been out for two seconds or twenty minutes, it’s time to wrap. 527 words today is better than zero words today.

While I normally put in a lot of  internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be this year’s thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.

CHAPTER SIX (continued)

As the data started to flow back from the orbiter, filling many of the ship’s video screens with close-ups and vistas of an entirely new world, the mood onboard the Cronus was good. It had been a busy two weeks getting the Titan probes modified, checked out, and launched. Everyone was riding an emotional high as all three Titan probes were operating successfully.

Most of the science crew was going into overdrive now that they were being flooded with raw data. It was one thing to be getting remote readings from varying distances across the Saturn system, it was another to be drowning in a tidal wave of chemical analyses, weather data, pictures, and videos.

The crewmembers who were the primary communications specialists were also losing sleep, making sure that as much of the data as possible was being sent down to the big AIs and researchers at Goddard and O’Neill. Bradbury also got a subset of the data since they were dealing with their own practical issues associated with very cold planetary surfaces with very toxic atmospheres.

Engineering crews were hard at work, both at finishing the Iapetus orbiter and lander and at figuring out how to bootstrap the job of making modified van Neumann machines to explore, mine, and build once they had reached the volatile-rich inner moons. Maintenance was stuck with the utterly boring and routine tasks of making sure that the air was breathable, the water potable, the hydroponics growing, and the toilets functional.

No one on Cronus was less than one of the tops in their field, and by the very nature of life within a small crew in a hostile environment, all were enough of a jack-of-all-trades to help out wherever they could. Back in LEO there could be average ironworkers or chemical engineers holding down a job for a paycheck. Out on the edge of human exploration, being “average” meant being dead, and probably taking a load of crewmates along with you.

Alsby was mindful of the stress that she and their new mission were putting on everyone. When the Titan probes were down, the data handling routine set, and the Iapetus probe preparations well ahead of schedule, she declared a general holiday for three days. A holiday schedule was set up which put everyone on duty for just an hour or two each day, in order to deal with any problems, The rest of the time was to be spent relaxing.

With Cronus still orbiting fairly far out from Saturn, Miller and Doctor Anderson looked at the radiation and cosmic ray background measurements before agreeing to allow brief excursions by everyone out to the exterior observation area.

Most of Cronus’ crew had come from the Earth-Moon area. They knew from their experiences there how truly stunning the Earth could be from a low orbit, a blue and white water planet with occasional stretches of forest and desert.

But no one had ever seen Saturn like this with their own eyes. Video images were fine, and anyone could pull the current view up at any time, but everything paled compared to the real thing right in front of your face.

As an example of things that will need to be tinkered with and “made better” in the next draft, the part yesterday where the four commanders are voting on the proposal for independence is not quite there. On the one hand, I want the repetitive, formal, “I agree,” “I agree,” “I agree,” “I agree” cadence, and I want to identify them by their full names and rank. That’s because I want to emphasize the solemnity and gravity (pun intended) of the moment. But it’s still a bit too wooden, needs a bit more to break it up.

Something to address in the next draft. Note made. (You don’t see them, but as I cruise along I’m constantly adding notes and comments into the MS Word file, so that I don’t forget them later.)

While I normally put in a lot of  internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be this year’s thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.

CHAPTER SIX

Coming in fast toward the thick, orange, and cold hydrocarbon soup that obscured the surface of Titan, the spacecraft’s primary computer listened to the radar, watched as the moon grew in front of it, and monitored all of the systems on its three subsections. The computer wasn’t a full AI, not being self-aware, but it was fast, redundant, and fully capable of carrying out the instructions that its AI mentor had taught it.

It was not a small spacecraft in absolute terms, over three thousand kilograms. Compared to the Cronus, which had launched it ten days earlier, it was a flyspeck. Much of its mass was in fuel, an extremely precious commodity out here a very long way from the nearest service station. The plan was for that fuel to allow the spacecraft to function for many years.

The spacecraft’s main computer checked one last time with the smaller computers on the lander and the floater. It verified one last time that its position was correct, and kept feeding the updated position data to the two subunits. The minutes counted down to seconds and milliseconds.

Right on the mark latches released, springs released their energy, and the two smaller spacecraft flew away from the orbiter. The orbiter took the pictures it had been assigned to take and reported the successful release back to the anxious science team on the Cronus, before reorienting and firing its thrusters for twenty-three seconds. The small nudge moved the orbiter off of its collision course with Titan and onto a path that would just barely miss the top of the atmosphere. With a series of additional engine burns to follow, it would pull into an orbit high over Titan, where it would spend the next decade or more studying and photographing the moon below while also serving as a signal relay station for the two spacecraft on the surface.

The two smaller units waited until the orbiter was well out their way before using a second set of clamp releases and springs to separate from each other. They drifted apart as planned, each lining up for their separate arrivals on Titan.

Following a fiery trip through the thick atmosphere, now separated by over a thousand kilometers, the two probes jettisoned their heat shields and drifted down under large parachutes, collecting data and photos all the way.

The lander scanned the surface below it, looking for a reasonably smooth place to set down. It was landing within the targeted zone away from the lakes and larger hills, but still could be damaged by landing in a field of ice boulders. Picking a landing spot, the lander flew the parachute toward it.

Twenty kilometers above the surface, the lander began to expand and unpack itself. Surrounding the core unit which housed the computer, power supply, radio, antenna, and scientific instruments, a lattice of stiff rods popped open, grew, and stiffened. When finished, the lander looked like a ragged sphere nearly five meters across with a massive core at the center. It looked like nothing so much as a gigantic tumbleweed.

One kilometer up, the lander cut loose from the now useless parachute and fell lightly toward the surface. It landed in a puff of frozen hydrocarbon dust while the parachute drifted off downwind. Breaking lightly through the icy, organic crust but only sinking in a few centimeters, the lander was down safely.

The floater followed a similar route, but instead growing into a large tumbleweed, it expanded a flexible outer shell into a smaller and more solid beach ball shaped form. Sensors on the outside watched to make sure that the probe was coming down into one of the large methane lakes and guided it accordingly. Being careful to watch for floating floes of water ice, frozen hard as diamond, the parachute stayed with the floater until it was only a meter above the surface. Plopping into the frothy, supercold liquid, the floater acquired a high-speed data link with the orbiter and began sending back its findings.

The orbiter would have been pleased had it been an AI, but instead it simply followed its pre-programmed instructions. Atmospheric data and pictures of Titan were taken constantly and the low-gain data links to the lander and the floater were recorded. When the landings were successful and the trickle of data from the surface turned into a flood, the orbiter began recording it all while also sending the data out through its two enormous dish antenna, the first aimed toward Cronus and SaSEM and the second aimed toward Ceres.

The aggressive exploration of Titan had begun.