The Wall: Eternal Day
Page 28
Do you have any questions or comments? Then write to me! I’d be very interested in knowing which characters you liked most and whether you read Day or Night first.
In any case, I hope you also enjoy the supplement to this book, The Guided Tour of the Moon. Maybe you already know, but if you sign up for my newsletter, you can also receive a color PDF version of the supplement, with many colorful pictures. Subscribe here: www.hard-sf.com/subscribe
Until the next mission,
Brandon Q. Morris
Also by Brandon Q. Morris
The Triton Disaster
Nick Abrahams holds the official world record for the number of space launches, but he’s bored stiff with his job hosting space tours. Only when his wife leaves him does he try to change his life.
He accepts a tempting offer from a Russian billionaire. In exchange for making a simple repair on Neptune’s moon Triton, he will return to Earth a multi-millionaire, enabling him to achieve his ‘impossible dream’ of buying his own California vineyard.
The fact that Nick must travel alone during the four-year roundtrip doesn’t bother him at all, as he doesn’t particularly like people anyway. Once en route he learns his new boss left out some critical details in his job description—details that could cost him his life, and humankind its existence…
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The Dark Spring
When a space probe returns from the dead, you better not expect good news.
In 2014, the ESA spacecraft Rosetta lands a small probe named Philae on 67P, a Jupiter-family comet. The lander goes radio silent two years later. Suddenly, in 2026, scientists receive new transmissions from the comet. Motivated by findings that are initially sensational but soon turn frightening, NASA dispatches a crewed spacecraft to the comet. But as the ship approaches the mysterious celestial body, the connection to the astronauts soon breaks. Now it seems nothing can be done anymore to stop the looming dark danger that threatens Earth...
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The Death of the Universe
For many billions of years, humans spread throughout the entire Milky Way. They are able to live all their dreams, but to their great disappointment, no other intelligent species has ever been encountered. Now, humanity itself is on the brink of extinction.
They have only one hope: The ‘Rescue Project’ was designed to feed the black hole in the center of the galaxy until it becomes a quasar, delivering much-needed energy to humankind during its last breaths. But then something happens that no one ever expected—and humanity is forced to look at itself and its existence in an entirely new way.
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The Enceladus Mission (Ice Moon 1)
In the year 2031, a robot probe detects traces of biological activity on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. This sensational discovery shows that there is indeed evidence of extraterrestrial life. Fifteen years later, a hurriedly built spacecraft sets out on the long journey to the ringed planet and its moon.
The international crew is not just facing a difficult twenty-seven months: if the spacecraft manages to make it to Enceladus without incident it must use a drillship to penetrate the kilometer-thick sheet of ice that entombs the moon. If life does indeed exist on Enceladus, it could only be at the bottom of the salty, ice covered ocean, which formed billions of years ago.
However, shortly after takeoff disaster strikes the mission, and the chances of the crew making it to Enceladus, let alone back home, look grim.
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Ice Moon – The Boxset
All four bestselling books of the Ice Moon series are now offered as a set, available only in e-book format.
The Enceladus Mission: Is there really life on Saturn's moon Enceladus? ILSE, the International Life Search Expedition, makes its way to the icy world where an underground ocean is suspected to be home to primitive life forms.
The Titan Probe: An old robotic NASA probe mysteriously awakens on the methane moon of Titan. The ILSE crew tries to solve the riddle—and discovers a dangerous secret.
The Io Encounter: Finally bound for Earth, ILSE makes it as far as Jupiter when the crew receives a startling message. The volcanic moon Io may harbor a looming threat that could wipe out Earth as we know it.
Return to Enceladus: The crew gets an offer to go back to Enceladus. Their mission—to recover the body of Dr. Marchenko, left for dead on the original expedition. Not everyone is working toward the same goal.
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Proxima Rising
Late in the 21st century, Earth receives what looks like an urgent plea for help from planet Proxima Centauri b in the closest star system to the Sun. Astrophysicists suspect a massive solar flare is about to destroy this heretofore-unknown civilization. Earth’s space programs are unequipped to help, but an unscrupulous Russian billionaire launches a secret and highly-specialized spaceship to Proxima b, over four light-years away. The unusual crew faces a Herculean task—should they survive the journey. No one knows what to expect from this alien planet.
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The Hole
A mysterious object threatens to destroy our solar system. The survival of humankind is at risk, but nobody takes the warning of young astrophysicist Maribel Pedreira seriously. At the same time, an exiled crew of outcasts mines for rare minerals on a lone asteroid.
When other scientists finally acknowledge Pedreira’s alarming discovery, it becomes clear that these outcasts are the only ones who may be able to save our world, knowing that The Hole hurtles inexorably toward the sun.
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Mars Nation 1
NASA finally made it. The very first human has just set foot on the surface of our neighbor planet. This is the start of a long research expedition that sent four scientists into space.
But the four astronauts of the NASA crew are not the only ones with this destination. The privately financed ‘Mars for Everyone’ initiative has also targeted the Red Planet. Twenty men and women have been selected to live there and establish the first extraterrestrial settlement.
Challenges arise even before they reach Mars orbit. The MfE spaceship Santa Maria is damaged along the way. Only the four NASA astronauts can intervene and try to save their lives.
No one anticipates the impending catastrophe that threatens their very existence—not to speak of the daily hurdles that an extended stay on an alien planet sets before them. On Mars, a struggle begins for limited resources, human cooperation, and just plain survival.
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Impact: Titan
How to avoid killing Earth if you don't even know who sent the killer
250 years ago, humanity nearly destroyed itself in the Great War. Shortly before, a spaceship full of researchers and astronauts had found a new home on Saturn's moon, Titan, and survived by having their descendants genetically adapted to the hostile environment.
The Titanians, as they call themselves, are proud of their cooperative and peaceful society, while unbeknownst to them, humanity is slowly recovering back on Earth. When a 20-mile-wide chunk of rock escapes the asteroid belt and appears to be on a collision course with Earth, the Titanians fear it must look as if they launched the deadly bombardment. Can they prevent the impact and thus avoid an otherwise inevitable war with the Earthlings?
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The Guided Tour of the Moon
The moon has accompanied the Earth almost since its beginning, around 50 million years after Earth’s formation. This celestial body that our ancestors marveled at by night—and in some cases, prayed to—was probably caused by a direct hit. A protoplanet roughly twice the size of Mars is theorized to have impacted the young Earth, moving at a speed of a few kilometers per second, causing large chunks to be flung into the Earth’s orbit. These pieces eventually formed the moon. The culp
rit also integrated its mass, including its iron core, into the Earth.
This whole process would have taken a year at the most to complete—the blink of an eye in astronomical terms. At that time the moon hovered at a very low orbit (30,000 to 50,000 kilometers) above the Earth, and only later did it move, in several stages, to its current orbital path.
A double planet
The result was a pairing that is unknown elsewhere in the solar system, and which most closely resembles a binary—or double—planet. No other moon is as large as ours in relation to its planet. In terms of size, Earth’s moon takes fifth place among the moons in the entire solar system, coming in after Ganymede, Titan, Callisto, and Io. In fact, the planet Mercury is not much larger.
However, the Earth to moon mass ratio is 81:1. The center of gravity between the Earth and the moon is therefore located very close to the center of the Earth, about 1,600 kilometers below the Earth’s surface. This makes it look from the outside as though the moon is simply circling the Earth.
The moon’s orbit is elliptical. Sometimes it’s as close as 356,410 kilometers from the Earth, sometimes as far as 406,679 kilometers. This is not insignificant for space missions to the moon, and yet this distance does not influence our perception of the moon in the sky. It sometimes looks much larger when it’s just above the horizon, but this is an optical illusion.
The moon’s structure
The way the moon formed determined its internal structure. After breaking away from Earth, its surface was wholly melted due to the energy released. This allowed lighter substances to rise to the surface, where they formed a thin crust, while the substances with more mass were drawn toward its interior. When the moon was young, large asteroids continuously bombarded its crust, which caused it to fissure and allow new magma to flow out. In addition, the strong tidal forces exerted on it by the Earth heated the moon.
The bombardment ended over three billion years ago. Due to its changed orbit, the gravitational heating also ceased to be a factor, and only the residual heat in the core remains at 800 to 1,400 degrees Celsius. Volcanism is no longer apparent on the surface. The moon’s core is relatively small, which means it doesn’t have a strong magnetic field as Earth has.
The effect of the Earth’s pull on the moon is nevertheless still evident. There are moonquakes, which register up to 5 on the Richter Scale and reduce the tension caused by gravity. In addition, the shape of the moon has altered slightly—like Earth, the moon is thicker at the equator than from pole to pole. There is also slightly more mass concentrated on the side facing the earth than on the far side.
How the moon influences the Earth
Of course, the moon also influences the Earth, and in a manner evident to astronomers and non-astronomers alike. Anyone who lives or vacations near the sea has firsthand knowledge of the tides that exist due to the pull of the moon. The tides are created because oceans form bulges directly in line with the moon. A second bulge forms on the other side of the Earth because the centrifugal force of the Earth-moon system is particularly strong there.
This ebb and flow probably greatly simplified the transition of life from sea to land. The phenomenon of tides would still exist to a lesser extent without the moon, because the sun also contributes to the tides due to its enormous mass, but only about half as much as the moon. In fact, only 30 centimeters of the tides are caused by the moon—the rest is created by the ebb and flow of related currents that are able to swell into stronger tides. The tides are highest when the sun and the moon are in line, that is, at the full and new moons.
The moon also stabilizes the position of the Earth’s rotational axis, which currently deviates by only plus or minus 1.3° from its mean of 23.3°. If there had never been a moon, the Earth would be considerably less stable over time, as shown by computer simulations. Over two million years, the tilt of the axis could change to anything from 0 to 60°.
Snow at the equator, 80-degree heat at the poles, seasonal temperature fluctuations from minus 25 to plus 45 degrees in the temperate latitudes—life would undoubtedly look different without the moon.
Taking a walk on the moon
Unfortunately, you cannot take off your helmet when you land on the moon. Due to its low weight, the moon could only retain a very modest atmosphere, consisting of helium, neon, hydrogen, and argon. This was largely transported by the solar winds. The noble gas, argon, comes from the moon’s interior as a byproduct of decaying radioactive potassium isotopes. The atmospheric pressure on the moon’s surface is quadrillions of times lower than that of the Earth.
Because the moon only possesses around a sixth of the Earth’s gravity, you can theoretically move across its surface in giant leaps. Unfortunately, it looks a bit different in practice because of the way the ‘jump’ phenomenon works. Your maximum jump height depends on the depth of your crouch, your body’s strength, its mass, and the pull of the celestial body.
If you can jump 50 centimeters high on Earth, and if you could beam yourself onto the moon in a tracksuit, then you’d need a room at least five meters high in order not to hit your head on the ceiling.
However, your movement would be restricted by a spacesuit—which you’d need to breathe as well as to endure the temperatures ranging between minus 160 degrees and plus 130 degrees. The suit also adds approximately 50 kilograms, but don’t worry, it would only feel like 8 kgs. So, you could count yourself lucky if you managed to even match your Earth jump height.
Water on the moon
The early bombardment of the moon is still easily discernible thanks to its craters, which reach sizes of up to 2,240 kilometers across, as does the 13- kilometers-deep South Pole-Aitken basin. On the far side of the moon, their number is even higher than on the near side. The crater walls often look steep on images from space probes due to the shadows that enhance this effect.
In reality, the walls only have gradients of a few degrees, so driving into them would not pose problems for our moon mobile. Not observable when viewed from Earth are the grooves, which could be lava flows that have erupted over time. Even lengthier are the lunar furrows of up to 400 kilometers, created in the lunar crust by tensions due to the cooling of the celestial body.
Water has never flowed along the channels on the moon. Erosion on the moon is caused exclusively by the relentless solar winds. However, the moon is not completely dry, as shown by NASA’s LCROSS experiment in 2010. The mission involved crashing two missiles into areas near the poles that are not illuminated by the sun. Water ice crystals were detected in the resulting loosened material, probably deposited on the moon by meteorites—similar to Mercury. The possibility of extracting oxygen from the regolith means that at least the most critical substance is available to construct a permanent moon base.
Anyone wanting to survive on the moon long-term, in a base there, for example, would need water. Although it’s long been known that there is water to be found in the depths of the lunar rock, it’s obviously easier to acquire it directly from the surface. A research team led by Shuai Li of the University of Hawaii and Brown University, using data from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument, revealed water ice in the craters at the South and North Poles just waiting to be extracted.
The M3 was launched in 2008 aboard the Indian Chandrayaan-1 probe. Most of the ice is located at the poles, specifically in craters never reached by sunlight. The temperatures there never exceed 110 Kelvin (minus 63 degrees Celsius). However, the researchers found surprisingly little ice overall. They suspect this is because only very occasional water-rich bodies have landed there. Existing ice deposits could have been destroyed during a pole migration.
No dark side
There really isn’t a dark side of the moon. But it does always turn the same side to the Earth. We can speak of a bound rotation: the moon turns precisely once on its axis each time it circles the Earth. However, the side that hides from Earth’s view is not darker. It is actually somewhat lighter than the side that faces us. The sun shine
s on it just as often, but it possesses a significantly thicker crust, meaning that it was rare for dark ‘seas’ to form there when the moon was young. Fewer asteroids were able to disrupt the far-side surface, which is why that side appears lighter from a distance.
But not only that—you can even find areas in permanent light on the moon. The sun perpetually lights the edges of the Peary Crater near the North Pole.
Exploration of the moon
The moon is, so far, the only foreign celestial body on which humans have set foot. The race to the moon, which in the end was won by the U.S., is legendary.
Apollo on the moon
In July 1960, no American had yet entered Earth’s orbit. Nevertheless, NASA and the space industry met in Washington to work on plans for future space travel. At first, they were only considering circumnavigating the moon. Abe Silverstein of NASA suggested the name of the god Apollo for this.
When, on April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin was launched into space and the Soviet Union won the first space race, the moon quickly became a top priority. On May 25, President John F. Kennedy gave his famous speech to Congress, calling for a human to be sent to the moon and returned to Earth, in the current decade: “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”