The Enceladus Mission: Hard Science Fiction

by Brandon Q Morris

  Instead of the commander, Marchenko answered, “I just gave Amy some oxytocic medication. We don’t want to delay this much longer. Everything is fine.”

  Martin sat on the floor of the airlock, with his back against the wall. Jiaying sat next to him and leaned against his shoulder.

  “It could be really romantic now, if we were not wearing the HUTs,” he ventured to say.

  She replied, “It is romantic. You don’t have a clue.”

  Watson reported the status of their approach to Saturn every ten minutes. In the meantime, Martin was dozing. Time seems to move terribly slowly today. After an hour and a half he and Jiaying were still sitting on the floor of the airlock. The flight was completely calm, as if they were on a space highway. There was only an arm’s length between him and the vacuum, but Martin no longer was worried by this fact. At least in one aspect the flight had never been as safe as now—meteorites zooming toward them from their direction of flight would not just be pulverized by the drives, they would be vaporized. He wondered what was happening in the sick bay right now. Martin was glad he did not have to assist. It must be hard on Hayato not to be able to witness the birth of his child, he thought.

  The wait ended at exactly 15:36 ship time. Marchenko reported, “I am happy to announce that a human being has seen the light of day, or rather the light of the spaceship. I give you the first true citizen of space.” Then he put the commander on the microphone. Martin could not understand what she said between sobs.

  Francesca interpreted for her, “The mother is overjoyed and would like to see the father of the child for a moment.”

  “Is that an order?” asked Hayato, and he too was hard to understand.

  “Yes,” the commander replied.

  “To protect the privacy of mother and child, I now deactivate the communication. Marchenko, out.”

  Jiaying looked at Martin. Were those tracks of tears on her face? he wondered, but he did not ask. Instead, he took her in his arms and squeezed her tight. Then he ended the embrace. She had to concentrate on her task.

  Watson continued to report the current data for the ship’s movement. The numbers were constantly decreasing. No problems, the drives are working perfectly. Martin clenched his fists. I really do not need any more excitement now.

  Another hour had passed by.

  “Neumaier to Masukoshi, see any conspicuous patterns?”

  “Negative.”

  This is good, Martin thought—and yet it seems strange to me. Will everything work so smoothly? I can't allow myself to think about this now. Then he noticed how difficult it had been for him to address Hayato by his last name. He’d had to work to remember it. With Marchenko, on the other hand, he always forgot the first name. But it didn’t matter, as Marchenko was simply Marchenko. With Jiaying, though, it was easy to remember the last name; Li—two letters in Latin script. She had drawn the Chinese symbol on his hand. The morning after, Martin had deliberately not washed that particular hand, and now he looked down at it. I wish I could look at it, but I am not allowed to take off my glove. Since he was starting to feel cold, he activated the gloves' heating circuit.

  “23 34 34. All systems online and in the specified range.” This was Watson’s latest report.

  Wait a moment, Martin noticed, the number is larger than the one Watson reported ten minutes ago. Martin’s palms were getting moist. The movement of the ship does not seem any different.

  He asked, “Watson, did I hear you correctly?”

  “I cannot answer that question.”

  “Watson, are we moving away from Saturn again?” Martin insisted.

  “Correct. The distance to the planet is increasing.”

  “Watson, why is talking to you like pulling teeth?”

  “I am interpreting this antiquated expression as a request for additional information.”

  “Watson, please.” The AI is definitely going too far. Martin decided he would simplify the Human Logic Module. Watson is trying too much to act like a human being.

  “Spaceship is moving at the intended speed. The maneuver has achieved its purpose,” the AI reported.

  “Watson, why did you not say that right away?”

  “Planned flight maneuver is not yet finished. There was no order to report an early completion of the goal. Data allow for the correct interpretation.”

  Martin clapped his hands and laughed. Jiaying got up and gave him a strange look. No, I have not lost my mind. He had only forgotten that he’d had this conversation via helmet radio. He blew her a kiss, which confused Jiaying even more.

  “Neumaier to everybody. Watson reports the braking maneuver near Saturn has been successful. Hayato, we've got to talk about the programming of the AI.”

  December 10, 2046, ILSE

  The gas planet Saturn completely filled the porthole. Red, brown, and greenish stripes extended parallel to the equator. These were cloud systems that received their colors from ammonia crystals and consisted mostly of hydrogen. Sometimes, they parted and showed the water ice clouds below that moved at 1,930 kilometers per hour.

  Martin traced a white spot. That must be one of the inner moons. He did not know which one it was. Maybe even Enceladus, our goal. In the Southern Hemisphere there are huge vortices that are larger than the continents on Earth, he noted. With the help of the South Polar Vortex—which might be billions of years old and could be clearly seen—Martin adjusted the dimensions. This storm is larger than Earth, he calculated.

  The rings surround the planet like the rim of a sombrero. The control jets had changed the spacecraft’s inclination so much that the rings were now visible in all their glory. One could clearly see the Cassini Division between the outer A Ring and the inner B Ring. Their goal was outside these distinct rings, in the E Ring, which the sensors of the ship noticed, but Martin’s eyes could not.

  The ship still flew on an elliptical course around Saturn. Their closest approach to Saturn would be within the rings, the farthest beyond the large moons. To reach Enceladus, the ship must decelerate at the right moment, when it was closest to Saturn. That moved the farthest point of its trajectory closer to the planet.

  At the same time, they had to adjust its orbital plane. They had flown toward this planet in the same plane in which Earth and Saturn moved around the sun. Most moons and the rings orbited Saturn in a plane that was tilted in comparison to it. However, if they moved into this plane too soon, they ran the risk of having to fly through the rings. While these were only a few meters thick, a collision with a lump of ice of just 10 centimeters in diameter could be fatal due to the high speed of the spaceship. Therefore, their goal was a trajectory in which the closest point lay outside of the rings, while its farthest one got them close to the moon Enceladus.

  The commander had decided to approach the goal slowly. While the DFDs would allow for a quicker adjustment of their velocity, Amy did not want too much risk. Now she had even more of a reason for this decision—they had lots of time to investigate the planet, the moon, and the ring system with every instrument available. Mission Control had already sent a wish list compiled by astronomers from Earth, who still had many unanswered questions, for instance concerning the creation of the ring system. The list was too long to be completed, but at least the crew was kept busy.

  I like this kind of work, Martin thought. This gives me time to look out the window and to daydream. Now and then he had to readjust an instrument or aim it toward another object, or compile and transmit data for a scientist who had asked to receive results in advance instead of through the routine transmission to Earth. The capacity of their downlink was sufficient for such requests, as the DFDs allowed for a much higher transmission power than in previous space probes. Even if they never landed they would advance research by years. The most difficult tasks were those when the scientists provided initial data in a format that the comparable onboard measuring system did not understand.

  I am pleasantly surprised Jiaying does not consider the night we s
pent together as a one-time event. The shift system prevented them from seeing each other all the time, but last evening she had invited him to a return visit to her cabin. Martin smiled.

  He thought of the new crew member who had quickly become the star of the team. When the commander starts her shift bleary-eyed because the little one has not wanted to sleep, there is always someone who enables her to nap for an hour by taking care of the baby. Amy had been able to nurse from day one. The low gravity seemed to be no problem in that respect. Marchenko was very satisfied with how things were developing. This baby must be the most supervised infant in the entire solar system, and Jiaying is always happy to take care of him. “So cute,” she always said, even though everyone already knew what she thought about the baby.

  However, the improvised diapers drove the parents crazy. Their absorptive capacity was low. While on Earth each liquid took the shortest path downward, under low gravity the baby’s digestive products sometimes moved in other directions. It was impossible to avoid a mess. At breakfast, Hayato regularly shared the details of these unfortunate instances, where everything had spread out during the previous night, and on what surprising body parts he'd had to apply the cleaning cloths. The women present pitied the new father—as if the mother did not face the same problems.

  Hayato and Amy still had not mentioned the baby’s name. They claimed to have agreed on a name, but they wanted to reveal it during a small ceremony. Martin was surprised how well they managed not to let the name slip out. They seem to enjoy the secrecy.

  Martin twitched and hit his head on the round metal frame of the porthole. I really shouldn’t doze off during work. He slapped his cheeks to become fully awake. The impulse he had felt was obviously caused by the drives that had just ignited. Until just now, the spaceship had been moving weightlessly through space. This meant they had reached the point closest to Saturn. During the next orbit they would not get as close to the planet, but they would be able to see Enceladus more clearly.

  December 12, 2046, ILSE

  The white ball on the fog display was so bright Martin shaded his eyes. Today was a special day, and therefore they all were meeting in the command module. Amy even brought the baby along. He slept inside a cloth the commander had wrapped around her chest. In a few minutes, the spaceship would stop circling the ringed planet Saturn. Instead, it was about to become a satellite of the bright ball of ice they were seeing on their display.

  This was a task no vehicle built by humans had ever achieved. Enceladus only had a diameter of 505 kilometers, about the distance from New York to Pittsburgh as the crow flies, and its mass was 1/6000 that of Earth. This meant its gravity was relatively very low. In order to avoid overshooting Enceladus, ILSE must decelerate to 850 kilometers per hour relative to the Saturn moon. From a cosmic perspective, this meant almost a complete standstill. Nonetheless, while it still orbited Saturn it could not reduce its absolute velocity at random, as otherwise it ran the risk of crashing into the planet. Watson had calculated a slightly ellipsoidal course, during which the ship’s speedometer would indicate 53,000 kilometers per hour near Enceladus—if it had a speedometer.

  Therefore, the task of the ship was to decelerate as quickly as possible, without endangering the passengers, and swing into an orbit around an object racing away from them at 43,500 kilometers per hour.

  “Imagine a motorcyclist having to circle around a car that is going 90 kilometers per hour, while he himself is zooming along the highway at 130 kilometers per hour.” That is how Martin explained to Jiaying what the ship was supposed to do today.

  “Of course this is a misleading comparison,” he added, when he saw the horror on his girlfriend’s face. “It’s no problem at all for the DFDs, don’t you worry.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier to keep us in orbit around Saturn? Didn’t that work well with the other Enceladus space probes?” Jiaying is a biologist and geologist, and you can have great discussions with her about minerals and the origin of life, but she really does not know much about navigation.

  “If it had only been about landing there, maybe it would have been,” Martin said. “It might have worked to drop a lander and then fly on. But imagine the return trip. The lander module takes off from Enceladus and has to link up with a ship zooming past it at 48,000 kilometers per hour ...”

  “Okay,” Jiaying said.

  “And then we would have a problem concerning the energy supply for Valkyrie,” Martin explained. “We need the ship in a stationary orbit so that it can beam energy down via laser. Otherwise, we would have had to land a power station on Enceladus as well. At thirty tons, the lander module is already heavier than all prior Enceladus probes added together.”

  “Please secure yourselves in your seats,” the commander announced. Her voice sounded higher than usual. The deceleration would for the first time create more than terrestrial gravity, so they would have to buckle in as they had done the last time on Earth. During the maneuver, the drives would be utilized far outside their normal parameters for a few seconds. Hayato, the resident expert, assured them this would not damage the drive system.

  “Deceleration in 30.”

  Then Watson started a countdown to zero. Martin's own inertia pressed him against the back of his seat. He looked to the left, where Enceladus was slowly moving into the porthole. The commander’s little son started to cry. The moon appeared to be moving slower and slower, until it finally seemed to stand still. Then it was all over.

  “Welcome to our destination,” the commander announced. One can tell she is still under a lot of stress, Martin observed. “We have reached a stable orbit around Enceladus. I think we should all relax for the rest of the day. Tomorrow we are going to pick a landing site, and the day after that we go down.”

  December 13, 2046, ILSE

  Martin stood in a supermarket watching a robot dog. This was the latest craze for boys like him. The animal recognized its owner and learned to respond to commands, just like a real dog. But, you did not have to take it for walks, and it only needed electricity as food, and it could do tricks no ‘real’ dog would ever master. It jumped higher, ran faster, and only barked when its owner gave the order.

  Martin circled the artificial dog. He walked through the aisles so that now and then he caught a glimpse of it. He really would have liked to purchase the dog, but he did not have enough money. The circles he walked around the dog got tighter and tighter. He asked himself, Should I just put the animal under my jacket and run out of the store? He wasn’t afraid of getting caught, but he worried the animal would be damaged if he stumbled and fell. Is the dog looking at me? Martin knew this artificial creature could recognize humans. Does it recognize me? Why does its gaze follow me, of all people? There were so many other customers in the store. Martin moved closer.

  “Hello,” the dog said. “Who are you?”

  The TV commercial seemed to have left out the fact that the dog could talk.

  “I am Martin.”

  “It's nice to meet you. I am The Dog.”

  “I know.”

  “Not the dog, The Dog,” The animal stressed the second “The.”

  “The Dog?”

  “Yes, that one—the one you are looking for.”

  “Really?” Martin asked.

  “Yes. Well, hop on.” The dog was suddenly three times its size. Martin was supposed to get on its back.

  “I don’t know.” He hesitated for a brief moment.

  “Yes, you have wanted to do this for a long time,” said The Dog.

  Martin followed the invitation and sat on the dog’s back. A hissing sound could be heard, and in front of them a hole opened up in space-time, its edges flickering.

  “Go,” Martin said. The dog obeyed and jumped. They fell into a tunnel that looked like it led through an aquarium. Large, smiling fishes were gazing down at them. The dog is running so fast, I'm afraid I might fall off. The water was getting darker and darker, and soon it was black, and the moon rose. It s
hined a brilliant white. Martin saw snow falling but noticed no clouds.

  “I...”

  This was the last thing Martin heard. The dog was gone, and he was alone in the darkness. Martin looked around. His body cast a huge, hard shadow. There was a gurgling sound. From the blackness of night, water was streaming, came quickly closer, and surrounded him.

  “I...”

  Martin could breathe under water. His reflection hung so close to his face that he jerked back.

  “Hey, Martin, wake up.”

  Jiaying’s hand caressed his shoulder.

  “I almost fell out of bed because you were rolling back and forth. I had to wake you up.”

  “Thanks, it's good that you did.”

  Martin checked his watch.

  “Another hour until my shift starts.”

  Jiaying smiled and said nothing. They cuddled up to each other and fell asleep again. Soon their time together would be over, and the exploration of the ice moon would begin.

  After breakfast, Martin had a déjà vu moment. They were sitting around the conference table. The fog display presented the shining image of Enceladus in highest resolution. They needed to find a spot where the lander module could touch down.

  “Watson has already prepared something.” The commander pointed toward an area near the South Pole. “However, I want you to bring up your ideas, no matter how odd they may seem. The problem is the AI is lacking data for a reliable decision. Furthermore, it might be using different assumptions than we are.”

  This had increasingly turned out to be a problem during AI research on Earth. Artificial intelligences easily learned to find patterns in mountains of data. Later the intelligences then further improved themselves by comparing desired and actual outcomes. Yet with issues concerning humans, and that applied to almost all issues, intentions were incredibly important—a concept AIs had a hard time with. Or did AIs develop their own intentions during the learning process, that later interfered with their neutral work?