by Gwynn White
Thank God, some said. It won’t. It doesn’t need to.
Imagine something bigger than Swift-Tuttle, an object measuring nearly 40 kilometers through its center, and roughly 50 times the size of Mount Everest.
Imagine the news, telling you that all the data was in on this object— collected from multi-spectral telescopes here on Earth, on Mars, in orbit around Jupiter, Saturn and a clutch of other planets, beamed to us from intergalactic probes breaching the outer borders of our solar system.
Imagine that the news said that the foremost civilian scientists in NASA, in the space agencies of Europe, India, China and Russia, collaborating with the military scientists of the UEF and individual nation-states, had gone through their calculations, and then gone over them again, and collated them with the data and everything said the same thing.
Imagine the scientists who said that Swift-Tuttle’s orbit would definitely not intersect our orbit, imagine that they said that, from all the evidence, the path of this bigger comet would cross the Earth’s.
You might laugh a nervous laugh.
Imagine they told you there were only seven years more before it hit. You’re not laughing now.
That’s Gabriel’s Comet.
The news was that the team at DEMOS, the ongoing Deep Ecliptic Multi-Object Survey led by Dr. Colin Gabriel at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, had announced new data and new calculations of the trajectory of one of the Survey objects, the QB1-o, that they had earlier discovered.
In that instance, the team had been focused on looking at objects beyond the orbit of Neptune, starting from about thirty times the distance from the Earth to the Sun and beyond. This volume of space is conventionally divided, the further out you go, into the Kuiper belt and its associated scattered disk, and the Oort cloud, which extends from outside the Kuiper belt to halfway to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
QB1-o was the name of the first trans-Neptunian object discovered after Pluto and its largest moon Charon in 1992. Scientists began to use that name to refer to the thousands of similar objects discovered in the Kuiper belt.
Consisting mainly of remnants from the creation of the Solar System, the Kuiper belt is similar to the asteroid belt but is hundreds of times more massive. The objects within are not composed mainly of metal and rock, but of ice—frozen ammonia, methane, and water. The Kuiper belt and its associated disk are the origins of short-period comets, with orbits lasting less than 200 years. Long-period comets originate in the Oort cloud.
In the days after the first media excitement over the discovery of new comets, the DEMOS team had regrouped and in a new press announcement, noted that one of the comets they’d discovered did have a non-zero probability of intersection with Earth’s orbit.
It was good for publicity, and therefore new funding, and so the team didn’t object when the headlines later that day heralded Gabriel’s Comet.
Previously, while news outlets had hyped up the possibility of an object hitting the Earth, the project team at DEMOS and at other scientific institutes kept discounting the possibility, noting that Gabriel’s Comet was like every other object being tracked—of zero threat to the Earth. It would likely miss us by millions of miles.
That was before new data, and new calculations, began saying something different: that Gabriel’s Comet had a medium-to-high probability of an intersection with Earth’s orbit.
When I was four or five, my dad’s reassurance was all I ever needed. I remember how big he seemed when he scooped me up and carried me in his arms.
The tattoo on his upper arm was one of the things you couldn’t help but notice. The central figure was a detailed bird of prey, its wings outstretched, and underneath it, in a half-moon curve around the base, words in all capitals, a phrase in a language I didn’t understand.
Still learning words, I’d point and try to say “Eagle”—only it came out “E-ga”—and Dad would gently correct me.
“Close, sweetie. That’s a falcon. A merlin, you know, like the magician. Sometimes it’s called a pigeon hawk.”
I’d try to follow the outline of each letter underneath the merlin with my finger, read them out one at a time. “P. E. R.”
Per ardua ad astra.
It’s been five years since I lost my father, and most of how I remember him are from photographs. But I still clearly remember the words on his tattoo, and the merlin.
My mother didn’t approve of getting tattoos. Apparently, my father already had them when he met her. There wasn’t any practical way to get rid of them, short of laser treatment, or tattooing something else over it. He’d proposed a black panther, but she wasn’t having it.
She hadn’t approved of piercing ears either. Of all her friends and acquaintances, she was the only one who used clip-on earrings, or none at all. The body was God’s temple, and anything foreign that you did to it was a sign of disrespect, of rebellion.
So, right after graduating, I did both.
Let me be clear, I loved my mother. My mother also needed me, and I wouldn’t take the easy way out and run like my brother did. But I had to do something for myself, no matter how small it was. In deference to my respect for her, at least I put my transgressions where they could be discreetly hidden.
In my final year of high school, I had been lucky to receive a Commonwealth Student Scholarship to the University of Guelph. Out of the bit of the money that I was supposed to use for books, I had my navel pierced and outfitted with a belly ring and falcon, and had an artist put a zebra tattoo on my back, its stripes fading into my skin, and a slight variation on my father’s motto beneath it in Roman letters:
PER ALTA AD ASTRA
Through the summit to the stars.
Piercing my navel and emblazoning a tattoo on my back made me feel like whatever stereotypes or fantasies the world wanted to project on me, I was invulnerable. I was taking ownership of my body, my self, setting my own standards higher than anyone else’s arbitrary standards of beauty.
The words made me feel powerful, like I could reach anything, the highest summit, the stars.
Not rebellion, but redemption.
Sic itur ad astra. Such is the pathway to the stars.
My brother’s message was, in its way, a congratulatory message, I suppose. If he’s one thing, he always takes the time to contact us when the conditions for deep space messaging are clear. Mom’s always thrilled when there’s the chance for some exchange.
With me it’s always short messages, even shorter than the maximum allowable. Bandwidth is limited because of the number of soldiers who want to send messages home. Usually Paul’s sentimental, but still terse, something like:
Europa sucks. Miss you and Mom.
You can’t hold a proper conversation, either. Coming from 390 million miles away, his signal takes roughly 50 minutes to get to Earth. Almost an hour, and it’ll be the same amount of time before anything reaches him in reply.
Mom would be in front of the television, streaming re-runs of David Attenborough’s documentaries, or the new Moriarty versus Holmes mini-series, and a message would come in. She’d think about it, message him back, and she’d watch four more half-hour episodes before getting a reply.
It can’t be too personal because, in the military, someone’s always looking over your shoulder, checking to see if classified or confidential information is being transmitted. You never know who might listen in.
So he never really talks about Dad or Mom to me. It’s just: I’m having C-Rations. What’s for dinner?
Or: Not looking forward to Echoriath Montes
Or: I’m sleeping better at night, thanks to the vapes
Or: Back on the Horikoshi. Thank God
Or, one he repeated ad nauseum: See you later, Zara-gator
Whatever the greeting, whatever the inanity, Mom answers. For me, it didn’t really matter—he left us too, and for that I can’t forgive him.
I never answer back.
After I finished wit
h the University, Mom gave me a choice of a European river cruise, or flying lessons, as a graduation present.
I chose to go with lessons from the Brampton Flying Club, BFC, at the Brampton-Caledon Airport, northwest of Toronto. Many ground spinners no longer had manual override even available as an option, but aerospinners—and even Paul’s starship—included some manual controls. This was as close to driving stick as anyone could get these days but triple the thrill!
The community in and around the BFC was expansive and welcoming, including staff at the Great War Flying Museum, and the 892 Snowy Owl Air Cadet Squadron. That—and the chance to feel, even briefly, that amazing feeling of escaping this world, without truly leaving it as my brother did—that clinched the deal.
That, and outside one of the hangars was a beautiful aerojet. They told me it was an Aerolite ASP-23 Narwhal. Metal and sleek, it looked fast. And it had a spinner drive. It was the hummingbird of planes.
I asked if I could fly it, and they laughed. Someday, they said. I had to start with a trainer.
Mom had earmarked me for a Recreational Pilot Permit, an RPP, which would allow me to fly two people to the cottage for a long weekend, but I wanted to go one further, to the Private Pilot License. A PPL had the fewest limitations, and I could upgrade the license in time with training, by flying an aerospinner with two or more engines, and in flying in poor weather or at night.
The PPL course at the Brampton Flying Club was based on a minimum of 25 hours of dual flight training, at least 20 hours of solo flight training, with 3 hours of dual and 5 solo cross country flying.
I blazed through the Ground School course in two weeks, trying to get as much of it done before distracting myself with getting a job. General knowledge, navigation, meteorology, air law, communications, artificial intelligence interfaces—I absorbed it all like a sponge.
The familiarization flight set me up in the pilot’s seat of an Aerolite AIT-7 Dragonfly, with a live instructor and the A.I. augmentation turned off.
It was breathtaking.
The sight of the Earth beneath—the green and tan checkerboard of farmland, the expanse of forests, the skein of rivers winding across the landscape, the blue of the lake—gave me a realization of how interconnected everything was.
The sight of clouds billowing with the winds and the closeness of the sky made me flush with a feeling of freedom.
Over the course of several months, I racked up my dual flight training with my instructor until, one day, I climbed into the training craft on my own.
It was a perfect day, full of sunlight and a good wind blowing.
I keyed the ignition, the engines thrummed, and the Dragonfly lifted into the air. Over the headphones, I could hear my instructor cheer.
“This,” I thought. “This is the path to the stars.”
After my first successful solo flight, I invited my instructor and a couple of buddies to a nearby pub for a celebratory drink. “On me!” I said, to hurrahs all around.
The big screen was on in the pub, but for once it wasn’t running the latest Blue Jays or Maple Leafs game. It had been interrupted by a news bulletin. One of our crew groaned.
Addressing the recent announcements on the Comet’s path, the United Nations had set out three initiatives to address the situation.
First, it instructed the United Earth Force to re-deploy the UES Ashitaka to intercept the Comet. The Ashitaka was a unique United Earth Ship in that it hadon board a mass accelerator, used by the UEF in bombardment of hostile territory on the outer planets. The objective would to bombard the Comet with enough kinetic projectiles to nudge it from its course. If it that did not move its course enough, the ship was instructed to engage the Comet directly.
Second, it mandated that the industries building and refurbishing warships immediately begin re-purposing these into colony ships. The goal was to move as much of the populace as they could off-planet in the next seven years.
Third, it directed that industries building apartment blocks, condominiums, homes turn their attention to constructing underground silos, understanding that there would be some parts of the population that would not be able to make the colony ships.
Finally, the UN underlined that it had every confidence that the UES Ashitaka would succeed, that the other two initiatives would very likely not be needed, and that they were proceeding based on an abundance of caution.
To repeat them exactly: “Based on an abundance of caution.”
Let’s move along folks, nothing to see here.
There was a strange buzz in the lounge, but the sports channel flicked back on, and everyone clapped me on the back and started ordering drinks.
On my third solo flight, I took the Dragonfly on a southwest bearing, towards Milton, to a height of four hundred feet.
The wind blew clouds past me as I was taking everything, and that’s when I saw it, below me, the Zoo, revealed like a hidden treasure.
I’d been to it before, of course, to visit Leia and the other animals. I’d gone through all the exhibits, the baboons and the lions and the leopards and the cheetahs, and even volunteered for a couple of seasons.
But from the air! Now I saw it, but I saw everything at once—the African savannah, the Arctic tundra, the Australian outback, and CIRCE in the middle like a human outpost—and it struck me that the Zoo, with its replicated ecosystems, was in essence a miniature of the entire world.
On that day, I decided, that was where I needed to be.
Part II
Unicorn
For Immediate Broadcast M3 70 63
Comet Deflection Mission Enters Next Phase
The first-ever mission to demonstrate a comet deflection technique for planetary defense, the Comet Redirection Project (CRP), is moving from concept development, numerical simulation, and preliminary design phase, to implementation, following approval by the United Earth Federation (UEF).
“CRP would be our first mission to demonstrate what’s known as the kinetic impactor technique -- striking the asteroid to shift its orbit -- to defend against a potential future asteroid impact,” said Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This approval step advances the project toward an historic test with a non-threatening small asteroid.”
The target for CRP is Comet C/21B9 M2 DEMOS, which will have an approach to Earth in the near future. The comet is also referred to as Gabriel’s Comet, after the project lead of the team that discovered it, Dr. Colin Gabriel. Dr. Gabriel is Project Director for the Deep Ecliptic Multi-Object Survey (DEMOS) at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.
Comet C/21B9 M2 DEMOS has been closely studied since its discovery by DEMOS. It shows as a typical object, with composition with similar characteristics to that of many of the same class of objects identified by DEMOS. The size is typical of asteroids or comets that could potentially create regional effects should they impact Earth.
CRP is basesd on the mass accelerator on UEF’s Ashitaka platform for orbital defense. The Ashitaka would fly to Comet C/21B9 M2 DEMOS, and use its on-board autonomous targeting system to aim itself at the comet’s primary mass. The mass accelerator’s projectiles would strike the body at a speed about nine times faster than a bullet, approximately 6 kilometers per second. Several of these projectiles would likely be required to effect a non-trivial change in the orbit, but this has not as yet been ascertained.
It is expected that both Earth- and Mars-based observatories would be able to monitor the impact and the resulting change in the orbit of Comet C/21B9 M2 DEMOS, allowing scientists to better determine the capabilities of kinetic impact as a comet mitigation strategy, and the number of standard projectiles required to effect such a mitigation.
The kinetic impact technique is effective because it is modifies the velocity of a threatening object by a small fraction of the total velocity vector. The effectivity is optimized by accomplishing it before any predicted impact, such that a relatively small expenditure of k
inetic energy accumulates over time to a large shift of the comet’s path away from intersection with the Earth’s orbit.
Small space-originating objects impact the Earth almost daily, most of them harmlessly breaking up in the atmosphere. It is very rare for the Earth to encounter any objects large enough to do surface damage. Larger objects—with diameters greater than approximately 1 kilometer in diameter—are sizeable enough to enable global effects, and have always been the focus of terrestrial and space-based monitoring of potentially hazardous objects with orbits that bring them in the vicinity of Earth’s orbit.
CRP would verify a technology set for deflecting objects classified as in the in the intermediate size range—large enough to do regional damage, yet small enough that there are many more that have not been observed and could someday threaten Earth. UEF assets continue to search for these objects, track their orbits, and determine if they are a threat.
To assess and formulate capabilities to address these potential threats, the UEF established the Interplanetary Defense Coordination Committee (IDCC), responsible for finding, tracking and characterizing potentially hazardous asteroids and comets coming near Earth and the inner planets, issuing warnings about possible impacts, and assisting plans and coordination of response to an actual impact threat.
5
Owl Droppings
While I was finishing my undergraduate degree, I became a Zoo volunteer—khakis, dark green polo shirt, work boots, name-tag and all.
As a volunteer at Glen Eden, I worked part of the time presenting introductions and talks to Zoo visitors, mainly tour groups, families and students on field trips. When preparing and presenting these educational talks, I could handle owls, vultures, iguanas, armadillos, king snakes, ball pythons, and various other small animals.