Original publicado en "Supernova Betelgeuse. Con otros cuentos".
José Alberto Villalobos.
Cartago AntiguoCr. 2024. ISBN 978-9968-03-641-21
This spacecraft, whose destination is the planet Mars, is the culmination of ten years of research, production and construction in space science and engineering by the six leading space agencies on our planet: NASA of the United States, ESA of the European Union, JAXA of Japan, Roscosmos of Russia, Guójiā Hángtiān Jú of China, and the Indian Space Research Agency (ɪsroʊ). Something like what is said, at the beginning in the TV series "Away", but with the launch from Earth, not from the Moon.
Costa Rica's contribution to this space program is not the construction of the spacecraft, nor its launch. It consists of astronautical support from the Space Traffic Earth Station.
It became operational on Monday, October 17, 2061, the year of Halley's comet's return to the central Solar System. It is also the year when the events supposedly occur, detailed in Arthur C. Clark's novel, "2061: Odyssey Three."
The station has not cost to my country, rather it will be a source of employment for technicians, engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and service personnel.
Due to its strategic geographical position, Costa Rica (10 degrees North latitude, 84 degrees West longitude), was chosen among many other sites, due to its proximity to the Earth's equator, which allows the ecliptic to be observed almost all year round, that is, the region of the sky where the orbits of the planets are located and thus have daily information about Mars. where the MARS ONE base is located, the intended destination of the MAvi-8 spacecraft.
The Station will be responsible for monitoring telecommunications with the Consortium's space probes.
It is located at a strategic point on the right side of "Calle Loros", right on the border between the provinces of Alajuela and Puntarenas, a few kilometers from where the Orotina Metropolitan Airport is planned to be built. It has a very well-attended visitor center, where every Wednesday from 9 to 11 a.m. you can take a 30-minute guided tour.
The launch pad used by the Space Consortium is in the Pacific Ocean, in Costa Rica, exactly at parallel 7°0'0" north.
265 km from Caño Island (08°42'21" N; 83°42'53" W), along the arc of the maximum circle that joins it with Cocos Island (05°31'41 N; 87°03'40" W).
It is a platform like the Odyssey, but completely renewed and with the latest technological advances.
The day has come!
"Dix, neuf, huit, ... A, Zéro, ... soulever," is heard over the Station's loudspeakers.
It is the count of the launch of MAvi-8 towards Mars. It's 8:05 p.m. Costa Rican Standard Time (UTC-6 a.m.). A few seconds later the glowing trail of exhaust fumes is seen on local and international television screens, rising majestically. Some images and minutes of video were repeated on the news, several times over the next two days.
The MAvi-8 carries five astronauts, two young couples between 28 and 35 years old, who have been in a successful relationship for at least the previous year, but who are not about to have a child. The fifth is an android, like "Data from Star Trek: The New Generation." Its name is... (Hello, dear reader; put it on yourself!)
This is the relay group for an equal number of colonists, all male, living on Mars. The remarkable boost that the MAvi-8 mission will give to the colonization of the red planet, in addition to the renewal of astronauts who will return to Earth, consists mainly of the transport of five groups of state-of-the-art instruments that will be installed in the colony:
A geological explorer searching for water, who will drill a deep well in the Martian subsurface (permafrost). It will find and draw water, for all the needs of this vital liquid, which the colony requires.
An extraordinary gas purifier, capable of maintaining the atmospheric quality of the MARS ONE for more than 10 years. It will capture scarce nitrogen and oxygen molecules from the Martian atmosphere, but its most important goal is atmospheric recycling in the colony's habitation modules.
A modular greenhouse, equipped with superior quality, non-GMO seeds.
You will be able to supply the colony with vegetables for at least five years without having to make major changes.
A versatile 3D printer, with the ability to be fed with inorganic and organic materials.
It will produce concentrated food for astronauts, with all the characteristics and nutritional requirements, like those found on Earth, but it will also print pieces of equipment that need to be renewed.
A combination of solar plant-batteries-mini nuclear reactor. It will provide the electrical power needed to run all of MARS ONE's electronic equipment, virtually indefinitely.
In the Martian colony, this marvelous set of scientific and technological equipment will be part of the "Hexagon". A complex already built, but not furnished. Now it is only one-sixth equipped with the most modern medical and pharmaceutical service in the Solar System. There are only two more, one somewhere secret on Earth and the other is a 10% mini version, which goes precisely on the MAvi-8.
From the Viking 1 and Viking 2 space missions to Mars in 1975; those of 2021; Perseverance and Zhurong, and all the others, have used a Hohmann Transfer Orbit to interconnect Earth and Martian orbits. It has been successfully tested many times, efficiently using the launch window, so that the space probe and its destination, Mars in this case, arrive at the rendezvous point – at the same time. But all those missions have been lightweight robotic craft.
Traveling first to Venus, an inner planet in Earth's orbit, would seem to go in the opposite direction, but in the case of MAvi-8, mainly because of its weight and because it is manned, a large nuclear plant is not used. To save energy, a trajectory like the one taken by the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn (1997-2017) is used. It will first perform a gravitationally assisted flyby of Venus to provide the spacecraft with enough motion, energy, and speed to modify the trajectory and propel it to Mars.
This Venusian part of the trajectory, close to the Sun, is of very high risk, given the strong incidence of solar gamma rays as they approach the star. The danger is both to the ship and its equipment, especially electronics and telecommunications, as well as to the physical integrity and health of the human crew. The shielding against electromagnetic radiation and solar wind particles was designed as the least thick and most protective, to reduce weight, without compromising the integrity of the mission.
But despite considering all possible sources of risk and calculating and applying error percentages, the intrinsic evil of probabilities, as my professor of statistics at the University of Costa Rica jokingly said, always lurks in wait and may occur at the least expected moment.
Now MAvi-8 is between the Sun and Venus, almost at noon local time, since the trajectory must consist of a low-flying flyby of that planet, so that the gravitational impulse works and the spacecraft is sent, back, to the outer region of the Solar System.
Later, when it was 1500 km away from being eclipsed by Venus (passing to the night side), a ferocious coronal mass emission occurs in the Sun, which reaches Venus in seconds.
Our star ejected a large amount of matter; plasma composed mostly of electrons and protons, plus a massive emission of electromagnetic radiation, a powerful and focused beam of strongly ionizing X-rays.
Due to an electrical discontinuity, the spacecraft loses control of its gyroscopes, initiates a strong rotation and translation following a propeller-like trajectory. It is left adrift, with the navigation system and radio communications operating with the minimum of control.
Not even the mini-HAL 9000, the main computer, is able to make the corrections.
The MAvi-8 is unable to resume the original trajectory, it is completely isolated. You cannot send or receive messages from the Space Traffic Earth Station in Orotina, or to any other station on Earth, the Moon, or Mars. Nor to any satellite or craft in orbit around the Earth that could transmit the signal
The 5 astronauts go to their posts in the command room, use their knowledge and experience to maneuver and bring the MAvi-8 to safety, hiding from the Sun, -in the shadow of Venus-.
Five minutes after the impact of the coronal mass emission, the spacecraft is driven off course, on a trajectory somewhere between weird and fantastical, but safe, off the night side of Venus.
The crew is expectant, but with a relative calm and a sense of precarious security, which at times reassures them and then makes them fear the worst.
Mavi-8's automatic navigation system and the efforts of the crew place them in an extraordinary orbit around the Sun, several thousand kilometers above the unbreathable, rather poisonous cloud cover of Venus.
They fly almost "geostationary" over a fixed point above the planet's equator, whose rotation is very slow (-116.75 days). At least that is deduced, after a quick reading of the spacecraft's position coordinates, its relative velocity with respect to Venus and its period of revolution with respect to the Sun (224.71 days), calculated with great effort by Hal 9000.
The most disturbing thing from an astronautical point of view is that the expected gravitational pull of Venus has been wasted. The mission to Mars seems impossible to follow and conclude.
Won't they have enough energy to continue?
Have they failed?
They are "quasi-stationary," in the shadow of Venus, fortunately over the planet's night hemisphere.
Will they stay that way any longer?
Will they fall to the planet, or will they rise again to the Sun?
Its situation could be a relief from the consequences of its proximity to the Sun, with its unexpected and dangerous activity, because since the star is hidden by the planet, it would act as a kind of physical and electromagnetic shield for MAvi-8.
But it will also be a serious source of problems, as the solar energy cells would never be charged and as a result, the chances of survival will deteriorate as the electricity supply of the batteries runs out.
You can see the Earth, in the last quarter, but no telecommunications equipment works. They won't be able to send any signal saying they've survived.
-Oh, no! -exclaims María José, the engineer of the MAvi-8.
I have two disturbing readings. In this navigation panel, the altimeter indicates that we are 100 Venusian radii (6,052 km) from the center of the planet, which is for now 108,208 million kilometers from the center of the Sun, in short, we are 108,813 million kilometers from the Sun.
- I have applied Kepler's Third Law and I get a period of revolution of 226 days, which is congruent with that of Venus, which is 225 days, since we are a little more distant from the Sun.
"We travel slower than Venus and then in a few days, we would come out of its shadow and again be exposed to the normal effects of the Sun, high temperature and radiation."
"We don't know if coronal mass emission is still continuing, but if so, we'd die from ionizing radiation and burning."
- I have calculated our orbital velocity, applying simple knowledge about circular orbits (v = 2 π R/T) and I get 34.01 kilometers per second, which means that we are falling behind about 3636 km every hour, as Venus travels its orbit at 35.02 kilometers per second.
We are inside the shadow cone of a total solar eclipse, caused by Venus on Mavi-8. Just imagine that Venus is like the Moon and that our spacecraft, a dot, is like the Earth and make an analogy by remembering the total solar eclipse of July 11, 1991.
"Comrades, I think we will come out of the shadow of Venus and perhaps scorch the Sun in less than three weeks, our reader of relative velocity with respect to the surface of the planet confirms this."
- That's how long we have left to live, unless we figure out how to stay longer in Venus' shadow, or that, in some highly unlikely way, we escape and continue the journey to Mars, or back to Earth.
A week has passed since the accident, the deadly dawn is already in sight. But it's a bit weird, kind of like it's three o'clock in the morning on Earth and for some reason that I can't explain, it seems like time is running backwards and we're approaching the conditions of the previous sunset, without being able to avoid it. All crew members work on a solution to solve the above problem. They have repaired three retrorockets whose remote-controlled command system was rendered useless during the solar emergency.
The solution to the momentary problem was always obvious to the whole team, they would have to travel a little faster, to keep the MAvi-8 with the same speed of revolution as Venus.
They will make short shots of the rockets, from time to time, increasing the speed and maintaining 35.02 kilometers per second, to remain in the safest position, close to the Venusian meridian opposite the Sun, the midnight meridian, and always continue within this eclipse, in the shadow of Venus.
"Well," says Jan, the agricultural expert, with a smile. Since it looks like the teams are reporting, I tell them that the plants that were planted in the greenhouse five months ago are still growing strong and healthy and will provide us with some kind of food.
- Will we have water, lighting, and air with the quality of the Earth? That is, passing the hot potato to our engineer and our physicist. Will we have the electrical energy to operate the physicochemical support equipment, will we be able to solve that? -.
"We think so," they reply between worried and confident, but we're going to check what state they were in. We know that in the shadow of Venus solar cells won't produce electricity, but we're designing an extreme solution to use them in an unconventional, never-before-used way.
- We'll tell you!
On Wikipedia on their laptops, astronauts find data about Venus’s flyby missions. The first one, made in 1962 by the Mariner 2 probe, at an altitude of 35,000 km, is striking. Also, the observations and measurements made by the Magellan orbiter.
- The batteries are at 23.5% of their charge, we will have to disconnect them and use them only when strictly necessary. We will use the mini nuclear reactor to hold its charge while we sleep. We must keep electricity consumption to a minimum. All support systems will operate at 10%, except for the greenhouse which will operate at 20%. We will have to learn to manage in the dim light, the lighting at 25% will only be maintained on the job site.
But because the Mavi-8 is essentially a cargo, it doesn't have specialized equipment. The five astronauts are purely dedicated to observing and taking photos. Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are in opposition and look very good, without the problems caused by the planetary atmosphere. They have seen the Milky Way, with a perspective never seen from Earth and some star clusters such as the Omega Centauri, the Orion Nebula, the Andromeda Galaxy and even a meteor shower.
One more week, the second, always in the shadow of Venus, but with astronomical twilight looming, astronauts are living closer and closer to an environment with greater outdoor lighting.
They desperately need a technological solution, an extraordinary and sophisticated creation of astronautical engineering that will allow them to escape the gravity of Venus and continue their journey to Mars, or return to Earth, where it seems that everyone in the Space Consortium believes that MAvi-8 and its crew were completely wiped out.
Sure, they don't have any rescue missions prepared, but if they knew there were survivors, they probably wouldn't have the technological capacity to recover them. Supposedly, coronal mass emission also affected, to a lesser degree, Earth's delicate electronic technology.
MAvi-8 is no longer at midnight, but like the terrestrial equivalent of four o'clock in the morning, the deadly dawn is approaching.
All the crew members have been working on what they believe is the solution to their problem. They have separated the solar panels and are coupling them to an anchor of two cable lines that they have wound in respective coils.
They estimate that two cables of about 5 km in length are enough to attach the panels to the outside of the MAvi-8 and fly them away backwards as if it were a large kite. They will add two more wires for electrical conduction of the same length, to bring the electricity that would be produced by the solar panels, when sunlight hits them. This will charge the batteries of the navigation system and will be able to activate the large thrusters of the spacecraft, to leave the stationary Venusian orbit and head for Mars or Earth, they will decide at the last moment. That is the solution that everyone seemed to be the only possibility and they are working as a group to achieve it. They are about to use it without any previous test, they can't risk wasting energy, or wasting time.
The MAvi-8 has a small cargo bay that gives access to the outside and there are astronaut suits for extra-vehicular activities (spacewalks), but only one of them has this type of training. So, taking a calculated risk, Marijó comes out with "Data" and in three hours they manage to install the coils for the Venusian solar energy kite, as they have called it. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew has spent two days collecting and coupling the two electric drive lines. They have worked overtime and overworked, they already have almost 6 kilometers.
The time has come to start this life-or-death experiment, they begin to develop the four-way umbilical cord that is in the coils. The solar panels are starting to move away, they are already two kilometers away, the wires oscillate as if it were a stationary sine wave, but they do not twist, and the electrical conductivity check indicates that there is connectivity.
Three kilometers and nothing... There is no electric current.
Four kilometers and the situation remain the same.
Desperation is reflected on their faces, possibly the large angle of incidence between the sun's rays and the panels makes the photovoltaic conversion not very efficient.
Four and a half kilometers, the needles of the battery charge indicators move and stabilize beyond the middle of the dial.
Electrons are flowing, and the batteries indicate that they are at 60% charge.
A whole more day with the MAVI-8 now in the twilight of Venus and with the kite illuminated by a sun like the one we would have at 7 in the morning on Earth.
The batteries are now at 98% charge.
The 4 crew members don't want to wait any longer. They take their places in the cockpit seats and grant Marijó the honor, or the terrible responsibility, of executing the uncertain maneuver of initiating the flight computers, which will automatically ignite and control the spacecraft's ionic rockets.
"Three, two, one, zero, oon," Marijó says and presses the power button.
The lights flash once, twice, three times and finally stabilize.
The typical firing sound of the MAvi-8's powerful reactors is heard.
The 5 astronauts almost take off from their seats and three of them scream excitedly.
- Marijó, you're a crazy genius with a lot of luck -
"Give the rockets power, accelerate to the maximum and let's stop being in the shadow of Venus," they say at the same time.
Without hesitating for a second longer, Marijó instructs the computers to accelerate the spacecraft, which rapidly increases its speed, leaving the life-saving orbit that kept them for more than three weeks in the wake of Venus. It almost resumes the original trajectory, albeit with slower speed and without gravitational push.
Venus is looking smaller and smaller.
Now comes a dilemma, whether to go on to Mars or return to Earth.
What would you do, dear reader?
Don't want to write your custom ending?
The MAvi-8 appears to be almost 88% of the state it was in before the accident, a quick check of the computers of the five super instruments indicates that they have not suffered serious losses, but the continuation of the journey will be much slower.
Their families would be happy to see them back on Earth, following their supposed death.
But the colonists of MARS ONE will not only be happy, but infinitely grateful.
So, they order the Hal 9000 to continue the trajectory they were on before the accident.
And so, they finally make their way very slowly to Mars, turning a near-miss, astronautical, into a possible success.
They will prolong the lives of four other Earthlings and further stabilize our colonization of the red planet, as planned.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario