The Enceladus Mission: Hard Science Fiction

by Brandon Q Morris

  They could not enter the lander as long as Francesca was still unconscious. Hayato woke her up with a small dose of adrenaline from the injector. After Martin made sure her eyes were open, he walked toward the lander module. He left it to Hayato to tell her what had happened. Francesca, who had just stood up, collapsed and sobbed inconsolably. Jiaying and Hayato tried to console the Italian woman. I know nothing can console her. Francesca lay on the ice, with Hayato and Jiaying crouched next to her.

  After ten minutes, Francesca raised herself on her arms and got up. They all marched toward the lander in single file. It was not easy getting in. First Hayato and Francesca connected to the SuitPorts and went inside. Then the automatic system separated their suits so the SuitPorts were free again. Martin took the suits and carried them a bit away from the lander.

  “Commander to ground team. We are waiting for you up here,” came over the radio.

  Martin thought of the laser concentrator Hayato had mentioned. Jiaying had already connected her suit to the SuitPort.

  Martin replied, “Commander, there is something I've got to do here.”

  “Martin, what’s going on?”

  He did not listen to what Jiaying called after him via the helmet radio. She is probably worried about me again. I am sorry for this, but I have an important task ahead. I will never have such an opportunity again. He turned around, and no one tried to stop him.

  He jumped in his suit to reach the laser concentrator with its large metal dish. The device was still connected to the optical cable that had been cut somewhere inside the ice. Martin knew the optical fiber core was surrounded by a conducting metal mesh. Together with the dish on the surface, the cable can form an antenna that can amplify potential differences in the ice and transmit them into space—at least if I adapt the software a little bit. He accessed the maintenance protocol and made his changes. Now the antenna would take variable electrical currents in the ice, amplify them, and broadcast them as a signal.

  The rest is up to you, he thought. I hope you make the most of it.

  Age of Questions, Nonahedron

  There is:

  The I.

  So much more Not-I.

  The confusion.

  The curiosity.

  The visitors, who are so different.

  The exchange, which is not working.

  8 billion not-I’s who do not understand the knowledge of the Twenty-Seven Ages.

  8 billion cells without an I.

  The regret.

  The wish to help.

  The others.

  The foam-born.

  Different, yet still the same.

  An address.

  A giant without a ring, surrounded by rays.

  There will be:

  The ascent.

  December 27, 2046, ILSE

  Getting up, taking a shower, working, exercise, free time, exercise, sleep—just two weeks ago, this routine had seemed terribly boring. Now Martin wanted nothing else. They had already created schedules for the coming twelve months. Marchenko was no longer there, so the shift duties had to rotate more quickly. About three times every two weeks his work rhythm would overlap with that of Jiaying, so they could spend a night together in the cabin.

  The crew had quite a few plans. Most of all, they wanted to remodel the garden. Sol would start to crawl around a few months from now, so he should have a safe playground. Mission Control had given permission for this. The resource usage was back in the normal range. Therefore, they would not need the eco module for growing food or generating oxygen. Nevertheless, there ought to be a few plants there, so the child grew up with a little bit of greenery. They would just have to make do without fresh food.

  They had more time for their return trip than planned, as their stay on the surface had been shorter. This allowed for a bit of sightseeing in the solar system. The planned course would lead through several fly-by maneuvers around other moons of Saturn and then initially into a wide orbit around Jupiter. Space probes rarely came by here, so the scientists would be happy about every scrap of data the crew could transmit back to Earth.

  For the time being, Francesca had taken over Marchenko’s cabin. She said she would manage and just needed some time.

  Every day, the research community on Earth sent new questions the astronauts could not answer. The scientists would have liked them to have continued the mission. There appeared to be two factions among them. Some scientists could not believe what Martin and Francesca had reported from the depths of the ocean, and therefore they tried to find natural explanations in the dataset. The others were fascinated by the idea of communicating with an alien intelligence and pushed to build suitable devices for this, maybe giant antennas. Martin preferred the skeptics, for if they won out, the Enceladus Ocean would remain undisturbed for the foreseeable future. If someone realizes what this could mean for developing theories of physics, the alien intelligence might become a slave of humanity. After this intelligence had just accepted the idea of not being alone in the universe, it might not be able to withstand the arguing power of humans.

  The media on Earth had turned all the astronauts into heroes, with Marchenko being far ahead. In his home country, he had even replaced Yuri Gagarin as the most famous space pioneer. One advantage of his being a dead hero was that he could not refuse when politicians of all stripes claimed him.

  Jiaying had already been offered a high position in the Communist Party. She had asked for some time to think about it. Martin feared their return to Earth.

  Hayato Masukoshi took care of Sol whenever he had the time for it. Martin had never seen him this happy—even when Sol cried for hours, Hayato never became impatient. It was a quiet, shy happiness that deeply touched Martin.

  He himself ignored journalists’ requests for interviews. The PR department was very unhappy about that. Sometime during the next few days I will have to change my mind, he knew. Luckily, live interviews were impossible. That would give him sufficient time after each question to think about an answer.

  Amy seemed quieter than she used to be. Martin suspected she felt that the events, particularly Marchenko’s death, were partially her fault. How could she have known what ideas he would come up with? Per standard procedure, NASA was already investigating if someone had made mistakes.

  Amy and Hayato had invited them to dinner. There were six places set, but one stayed empty. Hayato held the child in his arms. The boy was sleeping.

  “Dear colleagues… forget that. Dear friends,” she said. Hayato nodded.

  “Today I would like to thank you for doing everything you could to support the mission, and, more importantly, to help each other. No one can take that away from us. Yet I would like to thank one person in particular.”

  She looked at the empty chair.

  “Marchenko, you cannot be with us today. But I hope you won’t think it arrogant, but rather an expression of our sincere gratitude if we also name our son after you, by giving him a second name. Dimitri Sol. I think that sounds great. And I hope we will soon be able to tell him about you, Mitya.”

  Francesca sobbed, and Martin had a hard time suppressing his tears.

  Author’s Note

  Thank you for coming on this journey with me! I can’t tell you how much it means to have your support and your company on this long expedition to the outer regions of the solar system. And now, let’s sit down together and I’ll tell you a bit about myself.

  When I was a child, I always wanted to become an astronaut. I'm sure I shared this wish with many of you. I was only three years old in 1969, so I don’t remember Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. However, I have a clear memory of the last ones in 1972. It was so cool seeing Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt – admittedly I didn’t recall their names and had to look them up – driving around on the moon in their Moon Buggy, even if it was on a black and white TV set. I really wanted to be next but unfortunately, theirs was the final mission of the Apollo program.

  So I chose
my second-favorite career path, to be a writer. After studying physics, I worked as a journalist for many years, writing about science and technology and, yes, space. The magazine I work for, not coincidentally, is called SPACE. I get to see contemporary space hardware, follow launches (my last one was from Vandenberg AFB in May 2018), and interview people involved with what has now become a viable industry.

  But I want to write about more than today’s reality. Even if I never become an astronaut, I can imagine adventurous spaceflights and write them down—I am still hoping for Blue Origin to offer affordable tickets to space, and yes, I have already registered my desire with them. In the meantime, my kind of fun is to make my fiction as realistic as possible, based on current science – a degree in physics certainly helps – but also based on viable technology. Prognoses are hard, especially concerning the future, but I have a bit of hope that someday you might say, Wow, what’s happening now is pretty similar to what I read in that book! I can’t remember the name, but it was written by that Morris guy with the middle initial Q.

  Of course, I hope that you will continue to travel with me. The story of the ILSE expedition is not over. The first three chapters of the next book are included below. As the story develops, the crew must overcome a much greater threat than on Enceladus. Titan, another moon of the ringed planet Saturn, ist most notable for its thick atmosphere. Did you ever try to fly? On Titan you could, and Francesca will even show you how to make your own wings. You can preorder The Titan Probe, the sequel to The Enceladus Mission, now for only $3.99 at Amazon by opening this link:

  hard-sf.com/links/301759

  See you back in space!

  If you register at hard-sf.com/subscribe I will inform you about future publications of my science fiction titles. As a bonus, I will send you the beautifully illustrated PDF version of The New Biography of Enceladus for free!

  On my website at hard-sf.com you will also find interesting popular science news and articles about all those worlds afar that I'd love to have you visit with me.

  I have to ask you one last thing, a big favor: If you liked this book, you would help me a lot if you could leave me a review so others can appreciate it as well. Just open this link:

  hard-sf.com/links/302316

  Thank you so much!

  Brandon Q. Morris

  --

  Web: hard-sf.com

  E-Mail: brandon@hard-sf.com

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/BrandonQMorris/

  Translator: Frank Dietz, Ph.D. Editor: Pamela Bruce, B.S.

  Final editing: Marcia Kwiecinski, A.A.S., and Stephen Kwiecinski, B.S.

  Technical Advisors: Michael Paluszek (President, Princeton Satellite Systems), Dr. Ludwig Hellmann

  Cover Design: BJ Coverbookdesigns.com

  Brandon Q. Morris is a registered trademark of the Author.

  The New Biography of Enceladus

  Introduction

  Astronomers noticed relatively late that Enceladus would make a fascinating travel destination. It had been discovered in 1789 by the German-British astronomer William Herschel as the sixth moon of the planet Saturn. At first sight, it acted as would be expected from a moon of its size. It was only the photos taken by the Voyager probes in the 1980s that changed this perception. During its fly-by on August 26th, 1982, Voyager 2 sent spectacular images of the snow-covered surface, the network of craters and of deep fissures in the ice. These also showed that Enceladus was uncommonly bright, as it reflected 99 percent of the incoming sunlight.

  The photos spurred imagination among astronomers in several ways. For one thing, the photos showed large plains without any craters, which indicated they must be relatively fresh. Therefore, there must be processes in the interior of the moon that renewed the surface. The high albedo (reflectivity), the highest of any known in our solar system, can also only be explained by a snow-covered surface that is refreshed at regular intervals. But if there was no atmosphere, where would the snow come from?

  And then there was the mysterious E Ring of Saturn, which the Allegheny Observatory of the University of Pittsburgh first photographed in 1966. Spectroscopic analysis showed that it consisted mostly of small ice crystals—and there were other aspects of this ring that were exceptional. Enceladus moves around Saturn along the inner edge of the E Ring, exactly where the ring has its greatest density, which quickly made this moon the suspected cause for the unique properties of the E Ring.

  On July 14, 2005, the Cassini probe sent by NASA and ESA caught it red-handed. It photographed clouds of frozen water vapor above the surface of Enceladus, which was covered by relatively warm fissures. Two years later, Cassini provided the first photos of the geysers near the South Pole shooting water from the interior of the moon into space. A portion of that water seemed to provide new material for the E Ring, while the rest fell back down on the moon and made it shine in the whitest of whites.

  What other secrets does Enceladus hide? Follow me to an icy world, which might harbor unknown forms of life.

  The Orbit of Enceladus around Saturn

  Enceladus is the sixth largest moon of the ringed planet Saturn, and it was also the sixth Saturn moon to be discovered. Today, a total of 62 Saturn moons are known. Counted from the center of the Saturn system, Enceladus is the fourteenth moon, though in the classical numbering system, it was the second. Therefore, it received the designation Saturn II by the International Astronomical Union. With an average diameter of 505 kilometers—about the distance from New York to Pittsburgh as the crow flies—Enceladus is considerably smaller than Earth’s moon, which has a diameter of 3,475 kilometers, though among all the moons of the solar system, it still ranks as the seventeenth largest. It is the ‘average’ diameter, because the gravitational pull of Saturn flattens this moon slightly, by about three percent. This shape is called an ellipsoid.

  Enceladus cannot be observed from Earth with the naked eye. Its apparent brightness is at 11.8 apparent magnitude, and the human eye can see an object—under ideal conditions—up to a value of 6.

  Its orbit around the planet is an almost perfect circle. The average orbital radius lies at about 238,000 kilometers. This puts Enceladus very close to its mother planet, which will be important for understanding the processes in its interior. The orbit of Earth’s moon is about 50 percent larger. In addition, Saturn is huge compared to Earth. The distance from Enceladus to the ‘surface’ of the planet is only slightly below 180,000 kilometers, and Saturn has about 95 times the mass of Earth, and therefore 95 times the gravitational pull.

  This strong gravity has several effects on Enceladus, including on its orbit. Over millions of years, it caused the moon to always face the planet with the same side, something called ‘captured rotation.’ If you land on the back side of Enceladus you will never see Saturn, while from the planet's perspective you could only see the ‘front side’ of Enceladus. This is also the relationship between Earth and its moon.

  Like almost all of the moons of Saturn, as well as the rings, Enceladus orbits Saturn in a plane parallel to the equator of the planet. This is at an angle of about 27 degrees to the plane in which the planets move around the sun—the ecliptic plane. The orbit of Enceladus is also influenced by its siblings, which sometimes get very close to it. The orbit of Pallene, for example, the next moon closer to Saturn, is approximately 26,000 kilometers away, while the next moon further out, Tethys, has a distance of almost 57,000 kilometers. The tidal forces created by this interaction compel the moons into a kind of cosmic ballet. Dione, which is more than twice as large, is in a 2:1 orbital resonance with Enceladus. This means that for every two orbital periods Enceladus completes, Dione will finish one. With Mimas, which is further inward and a bit smaller, Enceladus is linked in a 3:2 resonance. And with the already mentioned moon Tethys, which is twice its size, Enceladus has agreed on a 4:3 orbital resonance.

  For one orbit around Saturn, Enceladus needs one Earth day, plus an additional eight hours and 53 minutes. It orbits at a velocity of 12.64 kilom
eters per second. Therefore, Enceladus is twelve times as fast as our moon orbiting Mother Earth. The reason for this is not the laziness of Earth’s moon, but rather the much stronger pull of Saturn on Enceladus. If Enceladus were as slow as our moon, it would have ceased to exist a long time ago. Our moon, on the other hand, would have quickly escaped the vicinity of Earth if it orbited as fast as Enceladus.

  By now you know how slowly Enceladus rotates. As it always shows Saturn the same side, it finishes exactly one rotation during an orbital period. The axis around which Enceladus rotates is exactly perpendicular to its orbital plane. Therefore, Saturn can always be seen at the same location in the sky over Enceladus. The rotational axis of Earth, on the other hand, is tilted toward its orbital plane around the sun—otherwise, Earth would have no seasons.

  White and Cold: The Surface

  There is a simple reason for the fact, as mentioned in the introduction, that Enceladus reflects light so well. The moon is completely covered with ice, perfectly normal ice as we all know it, i.e. water ice. This reflects light even better than freshly fallen snow on Earth. Enceladus is therefore often called an ‘ice moon,’ even though that is not literally true, as we will see in the next section.