Figure 1 - Barnard Planetary System
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON
SPACE, COMMUNICATION, POWER, AND
EXTRATERRESTRIAL MINING
of the
COMMITTEE ON
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
G.U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
One-Hundred-Forty-Fourth Congress
second session
————
January 14, 15, 2076
BARNARD EXPEDITION
Tuesday, January 14, 2076
G.U.S. House of Representatives,
Committee on Science and Technology
Subcommittee on Space, Communication,
Power, and Extraterrestrial Mining
Washington, D.C.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, in room 2318, Rayburn House Office Building, 9:37 a.m., the Chairman of the subcommittee, the Hon. John Ootah, State of Saskatchewan, presiding.
Mr. Ootah. The subcommittee will be in order. Without objection, permission will be granted for radio, video, and holophotography during the course of the hearing.
During the next two days, the subcommittee will review the reports recently received from the brave crew of interstellar explorers visiting the Barnard system nearly six light-years distant—the first ambassadors of the Greater United States to the worlds across the great void of interstellar space.
Our first witness this morning is Dr. Morris Philipson, Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University, who will brief us about Barnard and its unusual planetary system. Then the Honorable Frederick Ross, Chief Administrator for the Greater National Aeronautics and Space Agency, will describe the mission and the vehicles used in carrying it out. Dr. Joel Winners, GNASA Associate Administrator for space sciences, will be our wrap-up witness for this morning, telling us about what the expedition found in the star system—another race of intelligent beings, creatures so alien in their life forms and culture that they are almost beyond imagining.
We will ask the witnesses to present their testimony first. Then we will have questions after all of the testimony is completed. The House is going into session at eleven o'clock. There will be a series of votes, then a lengthy recess which will allow adequate time for more testimony. We hope in this process the delays in the testimony will be held to a minimum.
Dr. Philipson, if you will proceed?
Dr. Philipson. Mr. Chairman and members of the Subcommittee on Space, Communication, Power, and Extraterrestrial Mining, I appreciate this opportunity to testify before you about the Barnard system. I have a few holoslides that I would like to project during my testimony.
Mr. Ootah. Would the Guardian of the Committee Room Door please ask the room robots to dim the lights? Thank you. You may proceed, Dr. Philipson.
Dr. Philipson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will read from a personally proofed printout. With your permission, we can relieve the clerk from having to transcribe manually the robotic record and just insert the printout into the committee robotic reader.
Mr. Ootah. That will be fine, Dr. Philipson.
Barnard
In 1916, the American astronomer Edward E. Barnard measured the proper motion of a dim red star cataloged as BD+04 deg 3561. He found it was moving through the sky at the amazing speed of 10.3 seconds of arc per year, or more than half the diameter of the Moon in a century. Barnard's Star (or Barnard as it is known now) is very close to the solar system, only 5.9 lightyears away, but it is so small and dim that it takes a telescope to see it.
The cold statistics for Barnard are given in the table:
Distance: 5.9 ly
Right Ascension: 17 hr 55 min
Declination: 4 deg 33 min
Coordinates: X=-0.1 ly, Y=-5.9 ly, Z=+0.5 ly
Spectral type: M5
Effective Temperature: 58% solar (3330 K)
Luminosity: 0.05% solar (visual), 0.37% solar (thermal)
Mass: 15% solar mass
Radius: 12% solar radius
Proper motion: 10.31 arcsec/yr
Radial velocity: -108 kilometers/sec
The planetary system around Barnard is dominated by a gigantic planet, aptly named Gargantua. A huge gas giant like Jupiter, Gargantua is four times more massive than Jupiter. Since the parent star, Barnard, has a mass of only fifteen percent that of our Sun, this means that the planet Gargantua is one-fortieth the mass of its star. If Gargantua had been more massive, it would have turned into a star, and the Barnard system would have been a binary star system.
Gargantua seems to have swept up into itself most of the original stellar nebula that was not used in making the star, for there are no other large planets in the system. Gargantua has four satellites that would be planets in our solar system, plus a multitude of smaller moons. These planets will be the subject of further exploration by the Barnard mission. Today, however, we will be concentrating on the first world (or worlds) that they landed on—Rocheworld.
As seen in Figure 1, Rocheworld is in a highly elliptical orbit around Barnard. The period of Rocheworld about Barnard is forty days, while Gargantua's orbital period is exactly three times the Rocheworld orbital period. Thus, once every three orbits, Rocheworld passes within six million kilometers of the giant planet Gargantua, not too far from the orbit of Gargantua's outer moon, Zeus. It is believed that the present orbit was established many million years ago by the encounter of a stray planetoid with what was once an outer large moon of Gargantua.
Orbits such as that of Rocheworld are usually not stable. The three to one resonance condition usually results in an oscillation of the orbit of the smaller body that builds up in amplitude until the smaller planet is thrown into a different orbit, or a collision occurs. Due to Rocheworld's close approach to Barnard, however, the tides from Barnard cause a significant amount of dissipation, which stabilizes the orbit. This also supplies a great deal of heating which keeps Rocheworld warmer than it would normally be if the heating were due to radiation alone.
Rocheworld is a dumbbell-shaped double planet. As shown in Figure 2, it consists of two moon-sized rocky bodies that whirl about each other with a rotation period of six hours. There are exactly 160 rotations of Rocheworld around its common center (a Rocheworld "day") to one rotation of Rocheworld in its elliptical orbit around Barnard (a Rocheworld "year"), while there are exactly three orbits of Rocheworld around Barnard to one rotation of Gargantua around Barnard. This locking of Rocheworld's rotation period and orbital period to the orbital period of Gargantua keeps the strange double planet in its highly elliptical orbit. The energy needed to drive the Rocheworld configuration and compensate for energy losses due to tidal dissipation comes from the gravitational tug of Gargantua on Rocheworld during their close passage every third orbit.
The two planetoids or lobes of Rocheworld are so close that they are almost touching, but their spin speed is high enough that they maintain a separation of about eighty kilometers. If each were not distorted by the other's gravity, the two planets would have been spheres about the size of our Moon. Since their gravitational tides act upon one another, the two bodies have been stretched out until they are elongated egg-shapes, 3500 kilometers in the long dimension and 3000 kilometers in cross section. Although the two planets do not touch each other, they do share a common atmosphere. The resulting figure-eight configuration is called a Roche-lobe pattern after E.A. Roche, a French mathematician of the later 1880s, who calculated the effects of gravity tides on stars, planets, and moons. The word "roche" also means "rock" in French, so the rocky lobe of the pair of planetoids was given the name Roche, while the water-covered lobe was named Eau after the French word for "water".
The average gravity at the surface of these moonlets is about ten percent of Earth gravity, slightly less than that of Earth's Moon because of their lower density. This average value varies considerably depending upon your position on the surface of the elongated lobes. The gravity at one of the outward facing poles is eight percent of Earth gravity, rising to eleven percent in a belt that includes the north and south spin poles of each lobe, increases slightly to a maximum of eleven and a half percent at a region some thirty degrees inward, then drops precipitously to a half percent at the inner-pole surface. This low gravity point is some forty kilometers below the zero gravity point between the two planetoids, where the gravity from the mass of the two lobes cancels out.
On each side of the double planet are the L-4 and L-5 points where there is a minimum in the combined gravitational and centrifugal forces of the system. A satellite placed at either of these two points will stay there, rotating synchronously with the two planets, without consumption of fuel. For the Earth-Moon system, where the Earth is much more massive than the Moon, those stable points are in the orbit of the Moon at plus and minus sixty degrees from the Moon. In the Rocheworld system, where the two bodies are the same mass, the stable points are at plus and minus ninety degrees. The exploration crew established communication satellites at these two points to give continuous coverage of each side of both lobes.
The Roche lobe is slightly less dense than the Eau lobe, thus is larger in diameter. It has a number of ancient craters upon its surface, especially in the outer-facing hemisphere. Although the Eau lobe masses almost as much as the Roche lobe, it has a core that is denser. Since its highest point is some twenty kilometers lower in the combined gravitational well, it is the "lowlands" while the Roche lobe is the "highlands." Eau gets most of the rain that falls from the common atmosphere and thus has captured nearly all of the liquids of the double planet to form one large ocean. The ocean is primarily ammonia water, with trace amounts of hydrogen sulfide and cyanide gas.
The Roche Lobe is dry and rocky, with traces of quiescent volcano vents near its pointed pole. The Eau lobe has a pointed section like the Roche lobe, but the point is not made of rock. The peak is a mountain of ammonia water a hundred and fifty kilometers high with sixty degree slopes! One would think that the water would 'seek its own level' and flow out until the surface of the ocean became spherical, but because of the unusual configuration of the gravity fields of the double planet, the basic mountain shape is stable—except at periapsis.
When Rocheworld is at its furthest distance from Barnard, everything is serene on the double-planet. The two lobes whirl about each other and the gravity from the star causes modest tides on the ocean on Eau. As Rocheworld moves around in its orbit, it experiences stronger tides as it approaches either Gargantua or Barnard. At these times, the variations in gravitational tides from one rotation to the next causes large surges in the seas. The low gravity accentuates these surges into large waves that reach kilometers in height, breaking at the low gravity pole between the two planetoids.
As Rocheworld begins to approach Barnard in its elliptical orbit, the effect of the tides from the star begins to become very large. The peak of the water mountain now begins to rise and fall a number of kilometers, with the pattern repeated each half-rotation. As is shown in Figure 3, when Barnard is on one side of Rocheworld, the two lobes separate by thirty kilometers. This causes the mountain of water to drop one hundred kilometers.
[Dr. Philipson interrupted his prepared text at this point to interject a comment.]
Dr. Philipson. By the way. This behavior is not what would be predicted by a naive model of the gravity forces. I myself would have thought that with Barnard off to the side, the gravity tidal forces from Barnard would have drawn the lobes closer together, not farther apart. I also would have expected the change in the height of the mountain of water to be about the same as the change in the separation. But recent detailed computer studies here on Earth, that take into account the coupling of the angular rotation and the orbital motion with the planetary dynamics, confirm what Captain Thomas St. Thomas calculated at the time, and they both agree with what really happened on Rocheworld six years ago when we nearly lost the first landing party.
[The record returns to the prepared text.]
Then, just a quarter-rotation later, the tidal forces go the other way. Although the decrease in spacing of the two lobes is only seven kilometers, the effects are so nonlinear that, as shown in Figure 4, the mountain of water that has built up on the Eau lobe reaches up forty kilometers to the zero-gravity point midway between the two planetoids—and beyond.
The crest of the mountain drops as a rapidly accelerating, multiply-fragmenting waterfall on the hot dry rocks of the Roche lobe forty kilometers below. For the next two half-turns of the double planet, the showers of water repeat, and the torrent from the interplanetary waterfall pours onto the volcanos on the disturbed surface in a drenching torrent. Rapidly moving streams of water form on the slopes of drowned volcanos, to merge with other streams that soon become giant raging rivers, streaking out across the dry highlands of Roche.
Mr. Ootah. Thank you very much, Dr. Philipson. That's quite a spectacular planetary system there. If your schedule permits, we will proceed with the other witnesses and then have the questions and answers.
The next witness will be the Honorable Frederick Ross, Chief Administrator for the Greater National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We want to welcome you here and congratulate you for one of GNASA's most successful missions.
Mr. Ross. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee. I hope you remember your congratulations when you are working on our budget for the coming year.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Ootah. We most certainly will, Administrator. I personally will recommend a major new start to send a follow-on expedition to open up direct communication with the Rocheworld aliens.
Mr. Ross. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will be glad to work with your staff on the details of the bill.
Now, having been in office only five years, I can take credit for only one-tenth of this fifty-year long mission. Actually, all the credit should go to my distant predecessor Dr. Harold Mosher. It was he who initiated the plans to send a manned expedition to Barnard after the returns came in from the unmanned flyby probes.
The vehicles used on the Barnard expedition were unusual because of the unusual nature of the target. I will go through their structure and function in some detail in my printout.
The payload sent to the Barnard system consisted of the crew of twenty persons and their consumables, totalling about 300 metric tons; four landing rockets for the various planets and moons at 500 tons each; four nuclear powered VTOL exploration airplanes at 80 tons each; and the interstellar habitat for the crew that made up the remainder of the 3500 tons that needed to be transported to the star system.
This payload was carried by a large light sail 300 kilometers in diameter. The sail was of very light construction, a thin film of finely perforated metal, stretched over a lightweight frame. Although the sail averaged only one-tenth of a gram per square meter of area, the total mass of the sail was over 7000 tons. The payload sail was not only used to decelerate the payload at the Barnard system, but also for propulsion within the Barnard system.
The 300 kilometer payload sail was surrounded by a larger ring sail, 1000 kilometers in diameter, with a hole in the center where the payload sail was attached during launch from the solar system. The ring sail had a total mass of 71,500 tons, giving a total launch weight of the sails and the payload of over 82,000 tons.
The laser power needed to accelerate the 82,000 ton interstellar vehicle at one percent of earth gravity was just over 1300 terawatts. As is shown in Figure 5, this was obtained from an array of 1000 laser generators orbiting around Mercury. Each laser generator used a thirty kilometer diameter lightweight reflector that collected 6.5 terawatts of sunlight and reflected into its solar-pumped laser the 1.5 terawatts of sunlight that was at the right wavelength for the laser to use.
When fed the right pumping light, the lasers were very efficient and produced 1.3 terawatts of laser light at an infrared wavelength of 1.5 microns. The output aperture of the lasers was 100 meters in diameter, so the flux that the laser mirrors had to handle was only about 12 suns. The lasers and their collectors were in sun-synchronous orbit around Mercury to keep them from being moved about by the light pressure from the intercepted sunlight and the transmitted laser beam.
The 1000 beams from the laser generators were transmitted out to the L-2 point of Mercury where they were collected, phase shifted until they were all in phase, then combined into a single coherent beam about 3.5 kilometers across. This beam was deflected from a final mirror that was tilted at 4.5 degrees above the ecliptic to match Barnard's elevation, and rotated so as to always face the direction to Barnard.
The crew to construct and maintain the laser generators were housed in the Mercury Laser Propulsion Construction, Command, and Control Center. The station was not in orbit about Mercury, but hung below the "sunhook," a large ring sail that straddled the shadow cone of Mercury about halfway up the cone.
The final transmitter lens for the laser propulsion system was a thin film of plastic net, with alternating circular zones that either were empty or covered with a thin film of plastic that caused a half-wavelength phase delay in the 1.5-micron laser light. (During the deceleration phase, when the laser frequency was tripled to produce 0.5-micron green laser light, the phase delay was three half-wavelengths.) This huge Fresnel zone plate acted as a final lens for the beam coming from Mercury. Since the focal length of the Fresnel zone plate was very long, the changes in shape or position of the billowing plastic net lens had almost no effect on the transmitted beam. The zone plate was rotated slowly to keep it stretched and an array of controllable mirrors around the periphery used the small amount of laser light that missed the lens to counteract the gravity pull of the distant Sun and keep the huge sail fixed in space along the Sun-Barnard axis. The configuration of the lasers, lens, and sail during the launch and deceleration phases can be seen in Figure 6.
The accelerating lasers were left on for eighteen years while the spacecraft continued to gain speed. The lasers were turned off, back in the solar system, in 2044. The last of the light from the lasers traveled for two more years before it finally reached the interstellar spacecraft. Thrust at the spacecraft stopped in 2046, just short of twenty years after launch. The spacecraft was now at two lightyears distance from the Sun and four lightyears from Barnard, and was traveling at twenty percent of the speed of light. The mission now entered the coast phase.
For the next 20 years the spacecraft and its drugged crew coasted through interstellar space, covering a lightyear every five years. Back in the solar system, the laser array was used to launch another manned interstellar expedition. During this period, the Barnard lens was increased in diameter to 300 kilometers. Then, in 2060, the laser array was turned on again at a power level of 1500 terawatts and a tripled frequency. The combined beams from the lasers filled the 300 kilometer diameter Fresnel lens and beamed out toward the distant star. After two years, the lasers were turned off, and used elsewhere. The two-light-year long pulse of high energy laser light traveled across the six lightyears to the Barnard system, where it caught up with the spacecraft as it was 0.2 lightyears away from its destination.
[J. Spacecraft, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 187-195 (1984)]
Before the pulse of laser light had reached the interstellar vehicle, the vehicle had separated into two pieces. The inner 300 kilometer payload sail detached itself and turned around to face the ring-shaped sail. The ring sail had computer-controlled actuators to give it the proper optical curvature. When the laser beam from the distant solar system arrived at the spacecraft, the beam struck the large 1000 kilometer ring sail, bounced off the mirrored surface, and was focused onto the smaller 300 kilometer payload sail as shown in the lower portion of Figure 6. The laser light accelerated the massive 71,500 ton ring sail at 1.2 percent of Earth gravity and during the two year period the ring sail increased its velocity slightly. The same laser power reflecting back on the much lighter payload sail, however, decelerated the smaller sail and the exploration crew at nearly ten percent of Earth gravity. In the two years that the laser beam was on, the payload sail slowed from its interstellar velocity of twenty percent of the speed of light to come to rest in the Barnard system. Meanwhile, the ring sail sped on into deep space, its job done.
The interstellar spacecraft that took the exploration crew to the Barnard system was called Prometheus, the bringer of light. Its configuration is shown in Figure 7. Although quite large, from a distance it would be difficult to see Prometheus in the vast expanse of shining sail that carried it to the stars.
A major fraction of the spacecraft volume was taken up by four units. They consisted of a planetary lander called the Surface Landing and Ascent Module (SLAM), holding within itself a winged Surface Excursion Module (SEM). Each SLAM rocket is forty-six meters long and six meters in diameter, and masses 600 tons including the SEM.
Running all the way through the center of Prometheus is a four-meter-diameter, sixty-meter-long shaft with an elevator platform. Capping the top of Prometheus on the side toward the direction of travel is a huge double-decked compartmented area that holds the various consumables that will be used in the 50-year mission as well as the workshop for the spaceship's computer motile. At the very center of starside is a small port with a thick glass dome that is used by the star-science instruments to investigate the star system they are moving toward. There is enough room for one or two people under the dome, but the radiation level is high enough that the port is mostly used by machines, not people.
At the base of Prometheus were five decks. These were the home for the crew. Each deck is a flat cylinder twenty meters in diameter and three meters thick. The bottom control deck contains the consoles that run the lightcraft, with the earthside science dome at the center. The living area deck is next. This contains the communal dining room, lounge, and recreational facilities. The next two decks are the crew quarters decks that are fitted out with individual living quarters for each of the twenty crew members. Above that is the hydroponics deck with four air locks that allow access to the four SLAM spacecraft. The water in the hydroponics tanks added to the radiation shielding for the crew quarters below.
The hands and eyes of the near-human computers that ran the various vehicles on the expedition were embodied in a repair and maintenance motile used by the computer, popularly called the "Christmas Bush" because of the twinkling laser lights on the bushy multibranched structure. The bushlike shape for the robot has a parallel in the development of life forms on Earth. The first form of life on Earth was a worm. The stick-like shape was poorly adapted for manipulation or even locomotion. Then these stick-like animals then grew smaller sticks, called legs, and the animals could walk, although they were still poor at manipulation. Then the smaller sticks grew yet smaller sticks, and hands with manipulating fingers evolved.
The Christmas Bush is a manifold extension of this idea. The motile has a six-"armed" main body that repeatedly hexfurcates into copies one-third the size of itself, finally ending up with millions of near-microscopic cilia. Each subsegment has a small amount of intelligence, but is mostly motor and communication system. The segments communicate with each other and transmit power down through the structure by means of light-emitting and light-collecting semiconductor diodes. It is the colored lasers sparkling from the various branches of the Christmas Bush that give the motile the appearance of a Christmas tree. The main computer in the spacecraft is the primary controller of the motile, communicating with the various portions of the Christmas Bush through color-coded laser beams. It takes a great deal of computational power to operate the many limbs of the Christmas Bush, but the built-in "reflex" intelligence in the various levels of segmentation lessen the load on the main computer.
The Christmas Bush shown in Figure 8 is in its "one gee" form. Three of the "trunks" form "legs", one the "head", and two the "arms." The head portions are "bushed" out to give the detector diodes in the subbranches a three-dimensional view of the space around it. One arm ends with six "hands," demonstrating the manipulating capability of the Christmas Bush and its subportions. The other arm is in its maximally collapsed form. The six "limbs", being one-third the diameter of the trunk, can fit into a circle with the same diameter as the trunk, while the thirty-six "branches," being one-ninth the diameter of the trunk, also fit into the same circle. This is true all the way down to the sixty million cilia at the lowest level.
An interesting property of the Christmas Bush is its ability to change size. Just as a human can go from a crouch to an arms outstretched position and change in height from less than one meter to almost three meters, the Christmas Bush can shrink or stretch by almost a factor of five, from a short, squat bush to a tall, slender tree.
The "hands" of the Christmas Bush have capabilities that go way beyond that of the human hand. The Christmas Bush can stick a "hand" inside a delicate piece of equipment, and using its lasers as a light source and its detectors as eyes, rearrange the parts inside for a near instantaneous repair. The Christmas Bush also has the ability to detach portions of itself to make smaller motiles. These can walk up the walls and along the ceilings with the tiny cilia holding onto microscopic cracks in the surface. The smaller twigs on the Christmas Bush are capable of very rapid motion. In free fall, these rapidly beating twigs allow the motile to propel itself through the air. The speed of motion of the smaller cilia is rapid enough that the motiles can generate sound and thus can talk directly with the humans.
Each astronaut in the crew has a small subtree or "imp" that stays with him or her to act as the communication link to the main computer. Most of the crew have the tiny imp ride on their shoulder, although some of the women prefer to keep theirs in their hairdo. In addition to acting as the communication link to the computer, the imps also act as health monitors and personal servants. They are the ideal solution to the perennial problem of spacesuits... scratching an itchy nose.
The imps go into the spacesuit with the humans, and more than one human life was saved by an imp detecting and repairing a suit failure or patching a leak. In fact, there are two computer motiles with each suited human. The personal one that stays with the human, and the spacesuit motile that stays with the suit. This motile is usually outside in the life-support backpack, but can worm its way inside through the air supply hose.
[Dr. Ross interrupted his prepared testimony at this point.]
We think that life would be strange with a semi-living creature always attached to us. Yet think how bereft you would feel if you had forgotten your eyeglasses, pen, or wristcomputer.
[Dr. Ross returned to his prepared testimony.]
The crew exploring Rocheworld and the moons of Gargantua used some unique vehicles that were designed especially for those worlds on the basis of the flyby probe data obtained some decades before. In the following figures we will outline the construction details of the vehicles, since GNASA is proud of their outstanding performance.
The Surface Lander and Ascent Module (SLAM) was a brute-force chemical rocket that was designed to get the planetary science crew and the Surface Exploration Module (SEM) down to the surface of the planetary bodies so they could explore. The upper portion is designed to take the crew off the world again and back to Prometheus at the end of the expedition. As is shown in Figure 9, the basic shape of the SLAM is a tall cylinder with four descent engines and two main tanks.
The SLAM has a great deal of similarity to the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) used in the Apollo lunar landings, except that instead of being optimized for a specific airless body, the SLAM had to be general purpose enough to land on planetoids larger than the Moon that also had significant atmospheres. The three legs are the minimum for stability, and the weight penalties for any more are prohibitive.
The SLAM had an unusual problem (in addition to its unfortunate acronym). It had to carry the Surface Excursion Module (SEM), an airplane that was almost as large as it was. Embedded in the side of the SLAM is a long, slim crease that just fits the outer contours of the SEM. The seals on the upper portions were designed to have low gas leakage so that the SLAM crew could transfer to the SEM with minor loss of air.
The upper portion of the SLAM consists of the Crew Living Quarters plus the ascent module. The upper deck is a three-meter high cylinder eight meters in diameter. On its top is a forest of electromagnetic antennas for everything from laser communication directly to Earth (almost six lightyears away) to omniantenna that merely broadcast the present position of the ship to the relay satellites in orbit around the planetoids.
The upper deck contains the main docking port at the center. Its exit is upward, into the hydroponics deck of Prometheus. Around the upper lock are the control consoles for the landing and docking maneuvers and the electronics for the surface science that can be carried out at the SLAM landing site.
The middle deck contains the personal quarters for the crew with all the comforts of home. Individual sleeping cubicles, a good shower that worked as well in zero gee as in gravity, and two toilets. After the SEM crew has left the main lander, the partitions between the sleeping cubicles can be rearranged to provide a more horizontal orientation for the four crew members left in the SLAM.
The galley and lounge are the favorite spots for the crew. The lounge has a video center facing inward where the crew can watch six-year-old programs from the Earth, and a long sofa facing a large viewport window that looks out on the alien scenery from a height of about forty meters. The lower deck of the SLAM is all work. Most of the space is given to suit or equipment storage and a complex air lock. One of the air-lock exits lead to the upper end of the Jacob's ladder. The other leads to the boarding port for the SEM.
Since the primary purpose of the SLAM is to put the SEM on the surface of the double-planet, some of the other characteristics of the lander are not optimized for crew convenience. The best instance is the "Jacob's Ladder", a long, widely-spaced set of rungs that start on one landing leg of the SLAM and work their way up the side of the cylindrical structure to the lower exit lock door. The "Jacob's Ladder" was never meant to be used, since the crew expected to be able to use the powered hoist from the top of the ship. However, it is a sure, though slow, route up into the ship if everything else fails.
One leg of the SLAM is part of the "Jacob's Ladder", while another leg acts as the lowering rail for the SEM. The wings of the Surface Excursion Module are chopped off in mid-span just after the VTOL fans. The remainder of each wing is stacked as interleaved sections on either side of the tail section of the SEM. Once it has its wings attached, the SEM is a completely independent vehicle with its own propulsion and life support system.
The Surface Excursion Module (SEM) is a specially designed spacecraft capable of flying as a plane in a planetary atmosphere or as a rocket for short hops through empty space. An exterior view of the aerospace plane is shown in Figure 10. The exploration crew christened the aerospace plane the Magic Dragonfly because of its long wings, eye-like scanner ports at the front, and its ability to hover. The Dragonfly was ideal for the conditions on Rocheworld. For flying long distances in the rarefied non-oxidizing atmosphere, the propulsion comes from heating of the atmosphere with a nuclear reactor operating a jet-bypass turbine.
For short hops outside the atmosphere, the engine draws upon a tank of monopropellant that not only provides reaction mass for the nuclear reactor to work on, but also makes its own contribution to the rocket plenum pressure and temperature.
Dragonfly uses a nuclear power plant for its primary propulsion. Rocheworld had two large lobes to explore that were equivalent in land area to the North American continent. Although the humans would use the excellent mapping and exploration instruments on-board the plane to supplement their own limited senses, even these have distance limitations, and a long criss-cross journey over both lobes was needed to determine the true nature of the double-planet.
A naked nuclear reactor is a significant radiation hazard, but the one in the aerospace plane was well designed. Its outer core was covered with a thick layer of thermoelectric generators that turn the heat coming through the casing into the electrical power needed to operate the computers and scientific instruments aboard the plane. A number of metric tons of shielding protected the crew quarters from radiation, but the real protection was in the system design that had the entire power and propulsion complex at the rear of the plane, far from the crew quarters. Since the source of the plane's power (and heat) was in the aft end, it was logical to use the horizontal and vertical stabilizer surfaces in the tail section as heat exchangers. Because most of the weight (the reactor, shielding, and fuel) was at the rear of the plane, the center of mass and the placement of the wings were back from the wing position on a normal airplane of its size.
Dragonfly was more insect than plane. Although it could travel through space without any atmosphere, and could fly through the atmosphere at nearly sonic speeds, the attribute that made it indispensable in the surface exploration work, were the large electrically powered vertical talk-off and landing (VTOL) fans built into its wings. These fans take over at low speeds from the more efficient jet, and can safely lower Dragonfly to the surface.
The details of the human-inhabited portion of the Magic Dragonfly are shown in Figure 11. At the front of the aerospace plane is the cockpit with the radar dome in front of it. Just behind the cockpit is the science instrument section including port and starboard automatic scanner platforms carrying a number of imaging sensors covering a wide portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Next were the operating consoles for the science instruments and the computer, where most of the work was done. Further back was the galley and food storage lockers. This constituted the working quarters where the crew spent most of their waking hours. The corridor was blocked at this point by a privacy curtain which led to the crew quarters. Since the crew would be together for so long, the need for nearly private quarters were imperative, so each crew member had a private bunk with a large personal storage volume attached. Aft of the bunks was the shower and toilet, then another privacy curtain.
At the rear of the aerospace plane was the airlock, suit storage, air conditioning equipment, and a "work wall" that was the province of the Christmas "Branch", a major subtree of the Christmas Bush that went along with the aerospace plane on its excursions. Not designed for use by a human, the work wall was a compact, floor-to-ceiling rack containing a multitude of housekeeping, analyzing, and synthesizing equipment that the Christmas Branch used to aid the astronauts in their research and to keep them and the Magic Dragonfly functioning. Behind the work wall was the power conditioning equipment, the liquified air supply, and a large tank of monopropellant. All this mass helped the lead shield in front of the nuclear reactor keep the radiation levels down in the inhabited portions of the aerospace plane.
Mr. Ross. Well, those are the vehicles that the exploration crew used to travel to and in the Barnard system. It's now time to hear about what they found there. For that, I would like to utilize the scientific expertise of my capable assistant, Dr. Joel Winners. Thank you for your time, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Ootah. Your complete statement will be part of the record, Mr. Ross. We thank you.
Our next witness is Dr. Joel Winners, Associate Administrator for Space Sciences of the Greater National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We are happy to have you. You may proceed with your statement.
Dr. Winners. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's with great pleasure that I bring you what may be the most exciting news since the first landing on the Moon—the discovery of another race of intelligent beings. You have been learning some of the details in your daily video-news programs, but we are constantly obtaining newer information from the reports sent back by the exploration crew. In fact, some of the information you will get today was only received last night.
This is indeed a extraordinary event to be occurring during the Tricentennial year of the Greater United States of America and the seventieth year of the Canadian Union.
I too have a printout statement for the record.
There is an ocean covering one of the two lobes of Rocheworld. The liquid is a cold mixture of ammonia and water similar to what was found inside Jupiter's moon Europa. There are no land areas of any size, so the climate is determined by the heating patterns from Barnard as modified by the shadowing effects of the Roche lobe. There is a warm "crescent" that is centered on the outer pole and reaches around the equator. This crescent receives the most sunlight and the surface temperature reaches minus twenty degrees centigrade. The cold crescent is centered about the inner pole and reaches out to include the north and south polar regions. The temperature of the ocean surface here is minus forty degrees or colder. Because of these two regions covering Eau like the two halves of the cover of a baseball, we have quite unusual weather patterns. The ammonia boils from the surface in the hot crescents, leaving behind the heavier water, and falls on the cold crescent. We then get strong currents, with the warm heavy water flowing under the cold lighter ammonia-rich mixture. At the bottom of the ocean underneath these surface currents, it is very cold, reaching minus 100 degrees centigrade.
There are a number of mixtures of water and ammonia possible in the ocean. This is seen in Figure 12, which is a phase diagram for ammonia and water at 0.2 atmospheres. At this pressure level, pure water boils at plus 64 degrees centigrade, while pure ammonia boils at minus 61 degrees. The ocean composition varies from twenty to eighty percent ammonia, so a good portion of the phase diagram is covered.
There are four kinds of ice possible, one pure water, one pure ammonia, and two with varying ratios of water molecules to ammonia molecules. Ice floats on water, but sinks when the ammonia content of the ocean exceeds 23 percent. Since the cold inner poles are generally ammonia-rich from the ammonia rain falling on the cold crescent, the water ice that forms drops to the bottom and accumulates into glaciers. Ice-2 floats and Ice-3 sinks, leading to situations where you can have underwater snowstorms with one type of snow falling down and the other type falling up.
The aliens on Rocheworld live in the ocean. In genetic makeup and complexity level they have a number of similarities to slime-mold amoebas here on Earth, as well as analogies to a colony of ants. Each of their units can survive for a while on its own, but is not intelligent. A small collection of cells can survive as a coherent cloud with enough intelligence to hunt smaller prey and look for plants to eat. Larger collections of cells form into more complex structures. When the collection becomes large enough, it becomes an intelligent being. Yet if that being is torn into millions of pieces, each piece can survive. If the pieces can get together again, the individual is restored, only a little worse for its experience.
The aliens are large, weighing many tons. They normally stay in a formless, cloudlike shape, moving with and through the water. When they are in their mobile, cloudlike form, the clouds in the water range from ten to thirty meters in diameter and many meters thick. They often concentrate the material in their cloud into a dense rock formation a few meters in diameter. They seem to do this when they are thinking, and it is supposed that the denser form allows for faster and more concentrated cogitation.
The aliens are very intelligent, but nontechnological—like dolphins and whales here on Earth. They have a highly developed system of philosophy, and extremely advanced abstract mathematical capability. There is no question that they are centuries ahead of us in mathematics, and further communication with them could lead to great strides in human capabilities in this area. However, because of their physical makeup and their environment, the aliens are not yet aware of the potential of technology—again, the similarity to the cetaceans is striking.
The alien use chemical senses for short-range information and sonar for long range. They have some sensitivity to light, but cannot see like humans. In general, sight is a secondary sense, about as important to them as taste is to humans. One of the aliens is known, however, to deliberately form an imaging lens that it used to study the stars and planets in their stellar system. Called White Whistler by the humans, this individual was one of the more technologically knowledgeable of the aliens.
There are fauna on Rocheworld, all in the ocean and similar in chemistry, genetics, and structure to the intelligent aliens. One type are huge grey rocks that stay quiescent for long periods of time, only to suddenly explode, stunning all within a hundred meters and capturing them in their sticky thread nets. After absorbing their prey, they reform into multiple rocks that slowly convert the captured food into copies of itself.
Another type are bird-like creatures that don't do much except float around, perfume the water, and make twittering sonic vibrations. The aliens seem to tolerate them as pets.
The major flora are grey and brown plants which look like sedentary rocks with controlled thick clouds about them. They send out streamers and form new bud rocks at the ends. The plants do not use photosynthesis, since the red light from Barnard is too weak. Instead the whole food chain is based on the energy and minerals emitted by volcanic vents. We have similar isolated colonies of plants and animals around underwater vents in our own ocean depths. All life on the planet is concentrated at these few oases and the rest of the ocean is barren, without significant numbers of bacteria or other microscopic life forms. Because of this, the exploration crew was unaware there was anything living on the planet until one of the aliens made contact with them.
Reproduction for the aliens is a multiple-individual experience. The aliens to not seem to have sexes, and it seems that any number from two aliens on up can produce a new individual. The usual grouping for reproduction is thought to be three or four. The creating of a new alien seems to be more of a lark or a creative exercise like music or theater than a physically driven emotional experience. The explorers witnessed one such coupling put on for their benefit. In this case it involved four aliens, Loud Red, White Whistler, Green Fizzer, and Yellow Hummer. They each extended a long tendril that contained a substantial portion of their mass, estimated to be one-tenth of the mass of each parent. These tendrils, each a different color, met at the middle and intertwined with a swirling motion like colored paints being stirred together. There was a long pause as each tendril began to lose its distinctive color. We don't know exactly what happened, but obviously some chemical change was taking place that removed the strong host-origin identity from the units in the tendrils. Then finally the tendrils were snapped off, leaving the pale cloud floating in the center by itself, about forty percent of the size of the adults that created it. After a few minutes, the mass of cells formed themselves into a new individual, who took on a color that was different than any of its progenitors. The humans called the new baby Blue Warbler, because of its color and the distinctive acoustic note that it used for sonar sensing. The adults then take it upon themselves to train the new youngster. The adults and youngsters stay together for hunting and protection, the group again being very much like a pod of whales or porpoises.
The aliens have a complex art-form similar to acting, which involves carrying out simulations of real or imaginary happenings by forming a replica of the scene with their bodies. You can see this activity on a short segment of videotape that was transmitted back by the crew. I apologize that we have only a flatview version of the scene. The technology to produce holoprojection tapes had not yet been developed when the crew left the solar system.
[The prepared testimony was interrupted by the showing of a flatview projection tape. Copies may be viewed in the holoprojection rooms at the Library of Congress or purchased from the G.U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402.]
More than one actor takes part. The alien Yellow Hummer seemed to be most proficient in this art-form, and used it as one method of communicating with the humans. The aliens warned the explorers of the danger of the ocean transfer by simulating the Rocheworld with its seas. Two of the aliens, lighter in color, formed the rocky worlds. Another, blue in color, acted out the part of the seas. They showed how the rocky worlds whirled about each other, and as the year passes, and the elliptical orbit of the dual planet approaches periapsis, the tidal forces become stronger, and the sea on the smaller Eau lobe sloshes back and forth, gaining momentum. Then as the tidal forces become great enough, the aliens showed the humans how the seas cross the gap between the planets in a huge interplanetary waterfall that nearly engulfs the larger Roche lobe. Warned by the aliens, the humans made their dramatic escape off the Eau lobe by riding a huge wave, then gliding back through tornadoes to their rocket, which took them off the planet before the tidal wave struck.
Dr. Winners. That's all the information that we have at the present time on the aliens, since the crew had to leave the planet. However, they have informed us that they will go back on a prolonged visit, this time landing their rocket in a safe place in one of the larger craters of the dry lobe, Roche, so they can stay there through a number of tidal cycles while they get to know the aliens better. They plan to leave some interstellar laser communicators behind and teach the aliens how to use them to communicate directly with Earth, while the exploration crew goes off to visit the other worlds and moons about Barnard.
Of course, since it takes six years for messages to reach us from Barnard, that next visit has already taken place, and the radio message to us is somewhere in transit in the empty space between there and here. But, in a few years, we will be back with more news and information about what the aliens can teach us in the way of abstract thought and mathematics. We also expect that the crew will have a much better idea of the chemical and genetic makeup of this new race of beings after a year or so of study. This could have a profound effect on our understanding of the life process itself, and will produce great advances in medicine, perhaps even a life-prolonging drug without the side effects of No-Die.
Mr. Ootah. Thank you very much for your fascinating testimony, Dr. Winners. We also would like to commend the brave exploration crew who are out there gathering this information for us. They certainly will deserve a heroic welcome when they return.
Dr. Winners. The Chairman forgets. This is an interstellar mission. They will not return—ever.
Mr. Ootah. Oh... Yes. I forgot. There was a great outcry prior to the start of this mission that we were sending these brave people on a one-way "suicide mission". Yet, as one of them said, "We all are on a one-way mission through life." These people are fortunate enough to be doing something really significant for mankind with their lives, and probably having fun doing it.
Dr. Winners. If it were possible, I would trade positions with any one of them instantly.
Mr. Ootah. I think I understand, Dr. Winners. Well, the bells are ringing on our pagers. There is a roll-call vote in progress. If you gentlemen will excuse the committee, we will make the journey through the tunnel. After lunch, we will continue with the question and answer session. The subcommittee will recess until one-thirty.
[Whereupon, at 11:15 a.m., the hearing was recessed.]