The Ice Moon Explorer

by Navin Weeraratne

  The Ice Moon Explorer

  By Navin Weeraratne

  Copyright 2015 Navin Weeraratne

  Smashwords Edition

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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  Contents

  The Ice Moon Explorer

  References

  About the Author

  Connect with Navin

  Excerpt: The Hundred Gram Mission

  The Ice Moon Explorer

  "I've said over and overthat Enceladus is the most accessible habitable zone. It would win hands down over Mars or Europa. Europa is bathed with such intense radiation that it's hard to imagine biology. If organic materials are found on the surface, how do you know that it's not organic material raining down on the surface? But with Enceladus, what's inside is accessible. You don't have to scratch. You don't have to dig. You don't have to sniff. You don't have to do any of those complex things. All you really have to do is land on the surface, look up and stick your tongue out."

  - Carolyn Porco, Cassini Imaging Science Team [1]

  2065, Saturn's E-Ring

  "Pilot, where did Titan go?"

  The Ice Collecting Explorer's (ICE) scoop was fully unfurled. I looked through its translucent membrane. It had been clear as clingwrap (which it was related to) in the morning. Already, it was fogging with micro particles of ice and silt.

  "Titan?" said the computer. "Titan is right where it is, lady."

  A red square appeared on the smart glass cockpit. It caged a large dot of light.

  "Yeah but it can't be there," I pointed. I looked at the time. "Shouldn't it be still behind Saturn?"

  "Well it's not."

  "Yes but how come? Titan's orbit is sixteen days."

  "I don't know man. Why is the sun less bright? Are there cats? Why do only assholes wear Fedoras? You just leave the orbital mechanics to me, and you worry about the icy moon geology."

  Images from Enceladus Observer were on screen (two decades and that probe was still ticking). Enceladus was streaming ejecta into space like a hundred oil well fires.

  "How many geysers are we up to?"

  "Eighty three in the last pass," said Pilot. "Judging by plume volume, the eruptions will last a few more days."

  "Isn't that a record?"

  "For our mission, yes. Talk about right place and the right time."

  Indeed.

  There was an ocean under Enceladus. As it freezes, it gets smaller. Its forty kilometer ice shell cracks, and fissures form. Enceladus's core heats the ocean, which drives water up those fissures. It blasts into space, some returning as snow. The rest orbits for long as ten million years. It'll snow slowly, down on Tethys, Dione, and Rhea. It's been happening for eons: Saturn's E-Ring is a giant, frozen, ocean sample.

  "We can send the lander to collect the heavier matter."

  "Let's wait till the snowing is finished. I don't want to dig it out again." You'd think digging out my car after a blizzard wouldn't be a thing a billion kilometers from home. Shit work. It's why we still have a crewed program.

  "What's in our scoop?"

  "Life," said Pilot. "Lots of high heat silica. Bacterial fatty acids. It's traumatic down there - we even have shredded DNA."

  Far away and locked under ice, we had expected Enceladans to be unique. They should have been a different pathway of life, altogether. Instead, they were related to us. This meant a common origin. Did Earth-Mars meteorites seed Enceladus like they did each other? How did they punch through the ice? Or, had simple life already spread through the cluttered early solar system? Perhaps DNA was older than the Earth.

  "Prep the bioreactor, hydrothermal vent conditions. Let's cook some ice and see what happens!"

  "Are you sure?"

  "What do you mean am I sure? Of course I'm sure!"

  "Maybe we should do a sort first, separate fresh ice from older, E-Ring matter."

  "This ice is right out the geyser. These are the purest samples we've ever had. Why are you even suggesting contamination? Camping for an eruption, was your idea."

  "I just don't want to take any chances."

  "Well, we'll have half a ton of ice once this is done. Kapoor can take his time checking it. I'd rather not wait eight weeks to see what's alive down there. We can set up the bioreactor, today. Tomorrow, we'll have plankton and wrigglers to look at."

  "If there are too many wrigglers, they'll eat all the jellies and plankton. You'll just have a dead aquarium in a few days. I'm not the one who has to clean it out." The threat of shit work.

  I pulled up a status on the bioreactor. It was a chamber that could duplicate conditions in the ocean's different biomes. It needed chemicals, but I had stocked up before leaving Carolyn Porco Station.

  "We have enough magnetite. If the wrigglers become a problem, we can add a bit. That will inhibit them. It should be enough till we make it back to Porco."

  "Alright. I'll prep it then."

  It was, as things usually are in a small spaceship, uneventful. I followed Florida's climate refugee crisis on NPR, 79 minutes late. Vajra Kapoor checked in from Telesto, he was delighted with ICE's progress. He'd finished designing a new aquarium drone that never needed to surface. Maggie Liu (off mining Helium 3) called it his Worm Spy Cam. Worms were the apex of life on Enceladus. Worms and leeches - these days at least. The past had been quite different.

  "I've got this," said Pilot some hours later. "You should take the rest of the day off."

  "You sure?"

  "Yeah. And you're tired. You're starting to make mistakes."

  I looked at the time. We'd been working twelve hours, straight.

  "Alright, you finish up then. I'm going to the Village to have a beer with my son."

  Virtual Interaction for Long Agenda missions via Group Environment (VILAGE)

  "Did you hear about Van Prooijen? Got crushed to death by a rover. Family doesn't want to speak to him anymore."

  The Voyager Three was a dimly lit bar. Yellow and blue, Tron-style light strips trimmed the bar and tables. An Europa driller nodded to the Syrian-German punk music. The Halley's Comet miners watched baseball on a large TV, 79 minutes late.

  "No," I sipped my beer. It was, as always, as good as I remembered. "That's terrible. What's he going to do?"

  "His job I guess," Kapoor ate some peanuts. "What else is there for him? Mars is well automated, he'll be fine. Christina Henkel has taken him under her wing."

  "Henkel? They the Dead Engrams Club now?"

  "How many people want to hang out with a dead guy?"

  "I don't care if they're dead or not. They're still people."

  "Tell that to their families. You can't bury someone, and then log in and say 'hi'."

  "They should get used it. Any serious planetary scientist is going to outlive their body. If you're beyond the Moon, you've got a high fidelity copy in the Village."

  Above the counter, a huge TV showed a monster. It was a car-length worm, but with six fins. Two were alongside its lamprey mouth, like canard wings on a fighter. It investigated the camera, drawn by its searchlight. Black pits covered its face: nostrils. Blue ink squirted from a nozzle in the corner of the image. The monster waved off, like it had smelled a really bad fart.

  "I've not seen that before."

  "Oxygen," Kapoor grinned. "Just a wee bit dissolved in, with some coloring. I figured since it's so toxic to them, they'd be able to sense it. That worm shar
k won't be back."

  "Free oxygen in a hydrothermal vent environment?"

  Kapoor shrugged. "It works. And my cam drones don't get eaten anymore. It must be something they learned to sense a long time ago. Like how everything on Earth avoids hydrogen sulphide."

  "The whole natural history of Enceladus is just germs, jellies, and worms," I pointed at the screen, "And then these buggers show up. Suddenly it's like a tropical rainforest down there. And then, in a hundred million years, we're right back to jellies."

  "The Golden Age was their Cambrian Explosion," Kapoor kept his eyes on the screen. "Life on Earth also took ages to do anything interesting."

  "But it stayed interesting."

  "Earth is a better place to survive asteroid impacts than Enceladus. Whatever hit there -- Maggie has found ejecta, as far out as Ymir. Golden Age debris sticks out in this system, like a bruise under make up."

  "Not everywhere."

  "Yeah, I'm keen to see your latest. If those geysers bring up tissue from anything large and interesting, I'll find it. Clone it. Stick it in a tank."

  "For someone once quite upset by the shared biochemistry, you seem pretty keen on it now."

  "We'd have learned more on how Life itself emerges, if their biology was unique. I am annoyed about that. Look at how wrong we were about solar system formation? Until we could detect and study exoplanets, we had no idea. Biology has the same problem. We need to find different biologies."

  "Again, you don't seem overly annoyed that you haven't."

  "Look at this," he gestured to the screen. "How can someone stay annoyed? Because they're our cousins, we get to bring them back. It's just DNA. I can use the same de-extinction tools I would on Earth. Any water world with low enough gravity, will have its natural history preserved. It'll be frozen in orbit, or returned as snow. Solar radiation out here is lower. Water ice helps protect against radiation, too."

  "What about Europa? We might well have unique life there."

  "Fuck Europa. If John Dobbs wants to live to see results, they'll have to use nukes."

  "I heard Dobbs suggested sleeping through the drilling. Just waking up whenever anything goes wrong. Ten years, tops."

  We could all do that, sleep for months, even years. You didn't make it past Mars without hibernation nanotech in your blood. Mental health wasn't the problem: the Village solved that. It was just too expensive being an active passenger.

  It was all quite advanced now. The ship or station AI would handle the details for you. You could sleep for a month, and feel like you power napped.

  "See? See how ridiculous it is? And they're right there, in Jupiter's radiation belt. They can't even wear a suit and walk around. A day's worth of EVA on Europa, is a radiation death sentence. No, I'm thinking about beyond. Far beyond."

  "The Kuiper Belt?"

  "Exactly. Sure, Enceladus is contaminated. But what about the Kuiper Belt? That's more than five times Saturn's distance from the Sun. There's no chance of contamination. And there are thousands of Plutoids out there, thousands of worlds."

  "But not planets," I said quickly.

  "Thousands," he dismissed me with a wave. "How many have liquid water, under the ice? Geysers will form as they freeze. Even if the oceans die, the snow and ejected ice will keep perfect records. Enceladus is just five hundred kilometers in diameter, and has life. Sedna is a thousand. The Sednoids may have been captured from other stars. [2] We could study life from another star, right here in our solar system."

  Silence. On screen a tumbleweed rolled by: glowing jellies entangled by their own tendrils.

  "You seem very comfortable thinking that far ahead. That could be a hundred years from now."

  Kapoor froze.

  "Vajra? You okay?" maybe it was just lag.

  "Hey, like you said," unfreezing. "We're going to outlive our bodies."

  My son never showed. Instead, I received this message:

  Hey Mom,

  Sorry I can't make it today. Something unexpected has come up. I'm going to be out for a few days, maybe longer. It's mission related. I'll see you as soon as that's done.

  Josh

  He had never bailed on me before.

  The Next Morning, Saturn's E-Ring

  Another day aboard ICE.

  "Morning, Pilot," I got on the treadmill. Muscle wasting in zero G was still a problem we hadn't solved.

  "Morning, Kara."

  "What's up? You sound a little down."

  "Just tired."

  "Uhuh," It was hard hiding things from Pilot. Mental health monitoring was core to long-duration mission design. "Did you meet your son yesterday?"

  "He bailed."

  "I'm sure he had a good reason. It's not like when you got in; astronaut training is hard."

  "Yeah."

  The only sound was the treadmill.

  "So, we had quite a night last night."

  "What do you mean? I looked out the window. "Where's the scoop?"

  "I closed it."

  "Was it damaged?"

  "No, we're full."

  "We're full?" I almost fell off the treadmill.

  "We hit a dense pocket - a very dense pocket."

  "Wow. How did that even happen?" At our orbit, we were clearing just a few grams per square meter, per hour. How had we taken a month's crop in a night?

  "I guess we can head back to base then," I started running on the treadmill again. "How's the bioreactor doing?"

  "I'll show you."

  Images and graph plots appeared on a large screen.

  Enceladus's ocean was closer to antifreeze than sea water. It had regular sea salt, Sodium Chloride, but in much higher concentration. Water ice is pure. As the ocean freezes, it kicks the salt back into the ocean. This raises the salt content - further slowing freezing. It's just like salting a road.

  It's also loaded with Ammonia, another antifreeze agent. Together with Sodium Carbonate (washing soda), it makes the ocean highly basic. The pH is 12 on a good day. Reactions in the rock below, add more bases. Much more importantly, they release Hydrogen.

  Some say Hydrogen is to life here, what Oxygen is to us. That's incorrect. It's closer to what sunlight is to us. The ocean floor is covered in bacterial vent scums. The scums use the Hydrogen to produce Methane, which is their biofuel. Jellies and worms eat the scums. Bigger worms (like the wrigglers) eat those. Leeches steal from anything bigger than your thumb. It was likely the most common biology in the solar system. Perhaps, the Universe.

  "We got wrigglers."

  "Lots of them. I reined them in with some magnetite."

  Magnetite on the ocean floor was a byproduct of the Hydrogen reaction. Kapoor suspects they're building reefs with it down there. The larger, deeper water predators weren't keen on it. Good thing too, or they'd descend and eat the whole food chain.

  "That's odd. What happened to the magnetite?"

  "I used it."

  "All of it?"

  "There wasn't much."

  "I refilled it before leaving!"

  "Are you sure you didn't forget?"

  "Of course I didn't. And even if I did, there was already enough in the tank to last several weeks."

  "Well, maybe the gauge was faulty."

  I got off the treadmill and floated to the window.

  Saturn's rings were half my view. It was like we were skimming the edge of God's dinner plate. I looked into space at the local dots. I counted three. I should have been able to see Rhea, too.

  Where was Rhea?

  "Pilot, where's Titan?"

  The brightest dot was red-boxed. It was whereabouts it should have been.

  There were two bright dots left. "Where are Tethys, Dione, and Rhea?"

  Three red boxes appeared. In one, Rhea was quite faint.

  And of course, quite new.

  "Is everything alright?" asked Pilot.

  "Of course. Make a landing on the edge of the Damascus tiger stripe."

  "Land? That's not on our schedule."

>   "Like you said, you do the orbital mechanics. I'll handle the icy moon geology."

  Eight Hour later, Enceladus, South Pole

  I stepped out of the hatch, on to a life-bearing world.

  Below, in the Damascus valley, a line of geysers was firing. They shot water up at twice the speed of sound. Flash freezing, it built diamond columns a hundred kilometers into space. Lots of it would snow, someday, on other moons.

  It was bright. Saturn was out, and the lander floodlit the snow. Enceladus's fine grain snows made it the most reflective body in the solar system. Down in the "Tiger Stripe" valley though, the ice was a bit darker, and chunkier. Impurities form the ocean below.

  Impurities like Life.

  "I have no idea why we're down here," my suit radio spoke. "We should be heading - "

  I cut the feed. I also turned off the cameras. All Pilot knew now were my vitals and how much safety cable I was using.

  I stepped off the ladder. It was a slow process - bouncing around a microgravity moon is annoying when you have work to do. We videoed Maggie Liu doing a standing jump once, for social media. It took over a minute for her to land. And then she bounced. It got a ton of views.

  As if crossing a minefield, I moved towards Damascus.

  Before my parents were born, the Cassini mission discovered the "Tiger Stripes." They were valleys, clawing across a fifth of this world. One of the more active ones, they named Damascus. It was a busy place. I counted thirty simultaneous eruptions once.

  This time, I counted eight.

  I looked beyond to the other valleys. That raised the count to just twenty. How does an ice moon go from eighty three geysers to twenty, in one day? It doesn't. That should have taken two or three months.

  Months.

  "You son of a bitch."

  I hauled myself back into the lander.

  "Why did you turn off your radio?"

  I heard the bridge speakers through my suit. They must have been turned up loud. Frost fogged the outside of my helmet. I removed it and saw innocent screens and cheery green status lights.