Oceanworlds

by J. P. Landau

  67 | Titanic Winds

  Six days later, September 24 2030. Day 21

  TITAN

  The fuzzy pale orange ball of the past few days had become a looming Titan. Shackleton was past the point of no return: whatever happened would happen within its towering atmosphere, ten times taller than Earth’s.

  Seated and strapped alongside Sophia at the flight deck, Yi stared in both awe and alarm at the unfolding spectacle. Blackness became dark blue, moss green, and finally dusky yellow as smog shrouded their invisible gateway behind them. He remembered Nitha’s voice message. Characteristically optimistic and predictably bullshit-proof. Keep expectations low, in so many words. The probability of success was unknown, but it wasn’t good. Yi could already feel the mounting friction of the atmosphere against the spaceship. If it survives entry intact, it will need to stick a landing within a sixty-foot radius. If it hits the bullseye, the sea’s composition is anybody’s guess. And if it deviates more than a dozen or so percentage points from pure methane … But whatever his rational mind told him, his heart betrayed.

  The intercom went live again. Sergei’s voice said, “Good luck crew … do not give up.” Shackleton and Caird would be in open mic for as long as feasible. There was a chance, even accounting for the four-second delay each way, that Sergei could prove decisive. “Do not give up,” a forewarning coming from one of the most undaunted humans alive. Unfortunately for them, Titan, like Venus, is a super rotator. An appellation that soils underwear upon sole mention. Its upper atmosphere rotates much faster than its surface.

  The screen in front of them showed a globe map of Titan, with Shackleton connected through a dotted line to a triangle thousands of miles ahead, 500 miles below. That triangle was the Grasshopper, functioning as a tracking device to guide Shackleton’s main computer and make the high-precision autonomous landing possible. Likelier.

  Yi tensed his muscles as the structural tremors worsened. The marathon has begun. His harness was overly taut. Too late to seek comfort. The acceleration pressed him tighter against the seat.

  “241 miles above the surface, 12,700 miles an hour,” said TiTus, immune to body punishment.

  For the next ninety seconds the strain became excruciating. Yi felt a steamroller squashing every cell in his body. He soon became frantic when he could no longer inhale. His chest seemed to be compressing his lungs. There must have been a glitch on the entry gradient. When his eyeballs went from being shoved against his eye sockets to someone jabbing fingers against them, the flash of pain made him black out.

  Sophia regained consciousness and noticed her body hyperventilating. Her mind shut down but the body kept clinging to life. The pressure gluing her body to the seat eased. The screen said 134 miles of altitude and 1,140 miles per hour. We’ve survived atmospheric entry!

  A familiar noise became pervasive. Outside air rushing against the hull. External sound had been reborn, finally able to find enough atoms to propagate for the first time since they left Earth.

  The sprint now over, Shackleton was unceremoniously thrown inside a churning washing machine.

  Shackleton had become a plunging penguin. Before, it behaved as a ballistic missile, its speed so great that any atmospheric disturbance was imperceptible. Having erased most of the speed made it prey to air perturbation. Never an airplane, its lack of proper wings precluded gliding or negotiating turbulence. The spaceship’s terminal velocity on Earth, the outcome of gravity against air friction, borders 300 miles per hour. Titan’s gravity is a seventh and the air is 50 percent denser than Earth’s, which slashes this to around fifty miles per hour. The good news, thought Yi, is we can jump out without a parachute and perhaps survive impact. The bad is what happens when our puny terminal velocity interacts with the super rotating upper atmosphere of Titan.

  The jolts became swift and savage, accelerating Yi’s body forward one moment, leftward the next. This is what Sergei meant by “do not give up.” Nothing could have prepared them for what was about to come. There was no preparation possible, physical or mental. His spatial sense disintegrated. Focusing on the screen became an ordeal. He fixed his sight long enough to read ‘WIND SPEED: >250 mph.’ He saw in the corner of his eye Sophia vomit on a tug so hard it traveled horizontally before splattering against the hull.

  Yi was losing touch with his surroundings, his head drugged by the mercurial acceleration. He tried to concentrate on the screen and when he managed to capture a mental screenshot, the letters and numbers rotated inside his head like a runaway carousel. No! No! No! His mind trying to forget what it just deciphered. “ALTITUDE: 106 MILES.” At their falling speed it would take three hours before they crossed the sixty-mile mark, the point where the Huygens probe detected wind speeds under 120 miles per hour during its legendary descent in 2005.

  On his last moments of lucidity, Yi looked at Sophia. Even strapped tight to her seat she had become a crash test dummy, her limbs moving aimlessly around.

  THE RINGS OF SATURN

  Far within the rings, at a distance three times that between the Earth and the Moon, Sergei stared at the data log coming from Titan, deeply worried. The problem wasn’t Shackleton’s vertical but its horizontal speed. The violent westerly winds, times the low gravity, times the thick air, were drifting the spaceship over four feet east for each foot of vertical drop. The upper boundary from all simulations done on Earth was 2.3 to 1. The Grasshopper meteorological reports are right, he thought. There’s something brewing in Titan’s atmosphere.

  Under different circumstances the straying would have been tolerable. Huygens itself was designed for touchdown on any type of land or liquid due to the impossibility of anticipating Titan’s atmosphere, which kept the landing precision radius in the thousands of miles. This time the atmosphere was better understood but the wind prediction had gone seriously off. But the mandatory landing site cannot be changed, and neither can its unforgiving sixty-foot radius high-precision touchdown. The wind was creating a massive flight path deviation that would soon kill any hope of salvation.

  “What can we do, Sergei?” begged Derya, fixated on the data meters and graphs on Caird’s long, rectangular display. “We were trying to stick a landing comparable to—to Robin Hood hitting a target from across the English Channel. Now we must do it while riding on top of a unicycle.”

  “There’s only one way out: down.”

  What Sergei was about to ask Shackleton had never been attempted, or possibly even imagined, in the history of spaceflight, manned or unmanned.

  68 | Touchdown

  Minutes later

  Sophia’s mind was a current drifting between mental states: bobbing in the void; trapped inside febrile nightmares; or in a low-level consciousness. In the latter, the distant clattering of the spaceship was drowned out by the sedative howl of wind, yet now an insistent tin drumming kept calling her attention from her torpor. She forced herself into a higher state of awareness and the price was immediate, searing pain. Where am I?

  “SHACKLETON, OVER———KLETON, OVER—SHACKLE—”

  Her crumbled sense of reality began putting pieces together. Are … are we … falling?

  “—MINUTES BEFORE————FAIL——YOU MUST—”

  Sergei. The static made it an impossible word game puzzle. Sergei shouting … not normal.

  She was being tempted to go back where she came from, to stumble back down the rungs of consciousness. Guilt arm wrestled against her lost will. It took a monumental effort to supersede her rogue instinct, and then to force words out of her mouth. She finally managed to answer back to Caird.

  Sergei’s intermittent voice came back, “———don’t have time—override —TiTus——”

  She barely understood each word and couldn’t possibly connect them into a coherent sequence. About to give up, James’ last words flared in her mind, ‘Don’t fail. Make this count,’ with an adrenaline rush right behind them.

  Two days before, Shackleton had received a tiny file that a large tea
m had been working on since the accident. It carried a set of differential equations packaged into a repurposed algorithm derived from SpaceX’s nearly flawless high-precision autonomous rocket-landing track record. Four lives and the most important discovery in history depended on mathematics that fit on one side of a sheet of paper.

  Shackleton had a simple-to-describe, wickedly-hard-to-execute challenge: how to get to the landing target without running out of fuel. The spaceship was being tossed around by the atmosphere, constantly altering its position and speed, therefore continuously changing the problem’s solution. The Grasshopper worked as a beacon to calculate the vertical position and velocity with respect to the ground.33

  Override!? She partially understood the instructions but they seemed stolen from a Dr. Seuss story: jingly and nonsensical.

  “—OVERR——LANDING ALGORITHM———DRIFTING——————FIRE DOWNWARD”

  Sergei’s instruction required breaching the preset limits of the autonomous atmospheric guidance algorithm. Burning fuel to accelerate downward was outside its parameters because it had never made sense before. Except now it did. Shackleton would miss the target unless she, the commander, verbally instructed TiTus to follow Sergei’s orders.

  The ship’s shaking was dragging her back to unconsciousness. She kept trying and failing to give an intelligible order for system overrule but her body, the lateral yanking, and dwindling awareness made her mouth slur as if drugged by excess Margaritas and dental anesthesia.

  She yelled the words in a last attempt as she slipped into a black hole.

  Far off in the remote distance of her shrinking cognizance, she felt an abrupt thrust stronger than all the others.

  Two hours later, Sophia opened her eyes, trying to focus past the internal earthquake and nauseating migraine—which could only trigger painful gags and abdominal cramps after already having scattered all her stomach contents around the flight deck. We made it. We made it? We made it! Past an Ironman triathlon followed by a thrashing from a mob of hooligans. The wind was steady and smooth.

  She strained to turn in Yi’s direction. He seemed to be having a mild seizure. Sophia tried to speak but nothing came out. She stared at the displays and saw that Yi’s vitals looked normal.

  “ALTITUDE: thirty-nine miles,” announced TiTus. “Touchdown in 145 to 147 minutes.”

  She noticed the mild gravity pushing down her seat. Shack’s falling upright. She then raised her eyes to the Observation Window and her jaw dropped at the stupefying view before them. An extraordinarily Earth-like, sunset-orange mackerel sky of rather poor visibility, a common smoggy sight to a native Angelino like Sophia. She leaned forward, trying to see below. A herd of wooly cumulus clouds floated a dozen miles beneath them. Her eyes were drawn to a glittering patch in between. The methane seas of Titan! They were falling into the only other surface liquid bodies in the Solar System. And then searching for the light source of all this, she saw something to the side of a miniaturized Sun: the hardly noticeable outline of a colossal orb sitting on top of the horizon. Saturn looked like a solar eclipse—as if the Moon’s dark silhouette was obscuring the Sun, leaving only a blazing corona around—gashed right through the middle by a flaming slit twice as wide as the planet, the head-on rings of Saturn.

  THE RINGS OF SATURN

  “I think we should tell them,” said Derya, after quickly considering the pros and cons. “While they sure have enough on their plate, Shack’s instruments have been recording all this time and the infrared camera log could give us clues about how quick the storm’s moving north.”

  The Grasshopper weather forecast had been anticipating a months-long storm at the north pole, where the vast majority of the seas and lakes of Titan were concentrated. The massive storm was a regular event documented since the 2010s at the height of the Cassini mission. It incubates in the moon’s desert-dry equatorial regions, where moisture eventually funnels it to the poles.

  Since Shackleton fell past the atmospheric section of ultra-high winds, the steady fall allowed its antenna to be pointed at the rings and Caird unencumbered. Both crews had spoken and said a preliminary goodbye in case the connection dropped before they talked for the last time. Derya then analyzed the partial weather data arriving from Titan and realized the storm brewing in the equator seemed to be moving out.

  “I’m reticent to stress them if we don’t strictly need to, but do what you think is right,” Sergei said.

  Derya spent a few more minutes deciding. “Shackleton, over,” he said. But Shackleton was no longer in direct line of sight, having fallen under Titan’s horizon and thereby cutting any communication with Caird until and if they ever managed to escape its surface.

  I can warn Mission Control. They can relay the message back to Shack—Titan is a huge moon, though, Derya told himself. There are thousands of miles of safety margin between whatever happens in the equator and its north pole, no? Sergei is probably right.

  TITAN

  Yi was now functional enough to communicate in short, sparse phrases. He wished to have been more expressive in his goodbye to Sergei and Derya.

  With over an hour before touchdown, he decided to inspect the infrared and radar video feeds obtained in the past few hours side-by-side at high speed. First came the Shangri-La region, the immense plain of dark material where Huygens landed in 2005. Next was the Australia-size Belet region, home to the most spectacular sand dunes in the Solar System. He saw the endless rippling piles of sand rising 1,000 feet over the surrounding landscape, carved and sculpted by ancient winds, belittling their Saharan counterparts. The dunes were contained from the south by a tall, jagged mountain range extending many hundreds of miles. Yi wasn’t expecting goosebumps, but a massive cloud stood where the Senkyo region was supposed to be. Kraken Mare, their destination, was a long way directly north. As when spotting the alpha male among lions, he instantly knew he was looking at the megastorm.

  I wish we could have consulted with Derya, he thought. Cocky, but something of a meteorological expert. Drop ‘meteorological.’ Derya knew an inordinate amount about an absurd number of subjects. A walking talking encyclopedia. The amount of data the two spaceships had traded was a hundredfold what Shackleton could share with Earth, precluding a solid weather prediction from back home.

  It was impossible for Yi to guess the time it would take before hell broke loose over the north pole. It could be a day, a week, a month. Worrying doesn’t empty tomorrow of its troubles. Whatever it is, it is.

  Titan is tidally locked: the same hemisphere is always oriented toward Saturn. That makes a Titan day equal to an orbit around the ringed planet at sixteen Earth days long. Shackleton was falling toward the huge body of liquid known as Kraken Mare in the north polar region facing away from the planet. Nightfall would arrive there in three Earth days and linger for another eight. Plenty of time for refueling, Sophia thought. Assuming Shack splashes in the right chemical soup. If we don’t … ‘goodbye dear life’ will be certain although we have enough supplies to survive for years. ‘We’ being Sophia and Yi. The countdown for Derya and Sergei was measured in weeks, on a shoestring. In this scenario it could sound preposterous to imagine a flourishing career as an alien life hunter, but consistent with Nitha’s suggestion to keep expectations low, that’s what she was doing. It tempered her anxiety. If there’s life on Titan and we can find it, there’s enough equipment on board to make some of the grand scientific breakthroughs I won’t be making with Enceladus’ little fellows. She got greedy. If we ace the landing and the sea mix is compatible, the refueling should still allow for some highly conservative, ultra-responsible scouting. Don’t get me wrong, I mean just a few humble thousand feet around Shack. Look at it this way, not doing it would be an inconceivable crime. And no, I’m not being hyperbolic. Have something more important to do? Oh yeah? You go ahead and polish your toenails. Anyway, I think we should start by sampling Kraken Mare; then, depending on—

  Yi screamed in Mandarin. Never a good sign. �
�Yi?”

  “Look out the window,” he said in barely repressed ecstasy.

  She did and saw seven miles under them the chaotic drainage network of narrow channels, steep-sided rivers, and wide deltas feeding Kraken Mare, the largest sea on Titan’s surface, named in 2008 after the Kraken, the fearsome sea monster from Viking mythology. Aptly named, at least on account of the rough, Norway-esque coastal topography and proliferation of fjords and archipelagos.

  “Very impressive,” she said. Yi stared at her, disappointed. She continued, “Beautiful and … sooo similar to Earth. No? Okay. Big? Photogenic, maybe? Deep?”

  “Look at that cape where the tall coastal range sinks abruptly into the sea, there, on the right-hand side,” he said, his voice singing in excitement.

  “It seems to be capped by thick, low clouds.”

  “Yes! No! Tweety, you’re watching the plumes spawned by a spewing … volcano. An ice volcano erupting with slushy lava not of molten rock but water. You can sort of see its cone and crater, camouflaged by its snowcap. Water snow, isn’t that insane?”

  “Like—like the type people ski on?”

  “Yes! But that’s nothing,” Yi was yelling by now and even Sophia forgot her extreme fatigue for a little while. “We’ve finally discovered the long-predicted but never-proven communicating vessel between Titan’s exterior and its subsurface salty water ocean. Forget Enceladus! Titan has as of this very moment become a supersized Enceladus in the quest for life, 1,250 times more massive and with a subsurface ocean many times larger than all of Earth’s oceans combined!”

  MISSION CONTROL @ HANGAR ONE, CALIFORNIA