Midway: Chapter 28

  “Johannes, Maharet, and Anaru, could you please meet me in the conference room?” Tycho thought towards his home office computer terminal, which then relayed the request to all three of their PANs.  Before awaiting a reply, he undocked his medium scroll from his desk and headed there himself.

  “Is there a problem Tycho?” Johannes was the first to respond, and his face popped up on the pad. 

  “Not at all Johannes, quite the opposite really… I have some great new images of Haven that I’d like to show you three.  I’ve been using the interferometric array to compile a video, and I think that for the first time I can actually make out continents moving against an ocean.”

  “That’s outstanding!  I’ll pass along the message and we’ll meet you there in a few minutes.”  The interferometric array consisted of all four large telescopes about the ring of the ship being used in harmony to create the effect of one large telescope, with a resolution far superior than any one of the telescopes could achieve alone.  Only three were available now due to Gamma being dedicated to continuous listening for a message from Earth, but much of the work that went into what he had now had been done prior to the missing message incident.  This kind of work could actually be done with only two of the telescopes, but it was more effective the more one was able to use at any given time.

  Each was within the inner radius of the habitat ring, but mounted on telescopic struts extending from the central core.  If they’d been mounted on the habitat ring itself, they would have spun around along with the ring, which would have made them far more difficult to use.  Since the central core was counter revolving to the habitat ring, it had an effective rotation of zero.  It was the best possible platform on the ship to mount the telescopes.

  Each was a mightily powerful and sophisticated instrument in its own right, and usually only one was needed at any given time.  Each consisted of a ten meter mirror with instruments and optics capable of capturing the electromagnetic spectrum from the mid infrared, through the optical, and up into midway through the far ultraviolet.  The telescopes were capable of capturing the far infra-red but their instruments first had to be loaded with a coolant which first had to be manufactured elsewhere on the ship.  This process had only ever been carried out twice though, as part of somebody doing their tertiary training in astronomy. 

  They had high energy particle detectors for safety reasons, but in the x-ray, microwave, millimeter, and radio spectrums they were effectively blind except for short range radio communication receivers.  In their database there were clear instructions on how to build each of these, but none had ever become necessary, nor had anyone chosen such a project for their education.  On a long enough timeline, distant mission protocols dictated the need to build long wavelength observatories on the surface of Haven.   There was also buried within one of the ship’s launch tubes an x-ray telescope which would be launched into a Lagrangian point on their approach to the planet.

  Using all four telescopes together, one could conduct interferometry by synchronizing them effectively into one massive telescope with a diameter of nearly three quarters that of the New Horizon’s half kilometer wide habitat ring.   It was a tricky procedure though, which required infinitesimally precise timing to coherently aggregate the light received by all four telescopes.  If one was careful and correctly carried out the procedure though, the ship’s computers could then compile the data into one single incredibly high resolution image.   That was the magic.  The process required timing derived from atomic clock technology first pioneered in the mid twentieth century, which had been incorporated into the New Horizon’s systems.

  The conference room contained a large rectangular table in the middle.   It was exactly like the ones from the dining hall except this one lived here.  To one side of the table was a large monitor occupying most of the long wall running parallel to the table.  Tycho entered the room, pulled his scroll apart, laid it down on the table, and with a silent command ordered the pad to sync with the large wall screen at which point his PAN desktop appeared on it, all in less than a second.   His preferred desktop image, the one which appeared on the large wall monitor after synching his pad to it, was the iconic ‘Ludicrously Deep Field’ image.  This was the fifth in a series of images which had originated with old Hubble’s original ‘Deep Field’ image, and then later the ‘Ultra Deep Field’, and in 2012 the ‘eXtreme Deep Field’.  The premise of these images was to point a massive telescope like the Hubble Space Telescope (which by 2012 was an antiquated but still very powerful instrument with modern upgrades), at a completely empty patch of sky and allow the incoming light to aggregate over long periods of time.

  In the case of the ‘Hubble Deep Field’ the observation was over a matter of days; and in the case of the ‘Hubble Ultra Deep Field’ it was over a matter of weeks, and the eXtreme Deep Field consisted of periodic observations   over the course of an entire decade.   A half century later, the aging James Webb Space Telescope was used for a solid six months of continuous exposure in order to create the fourth incarnation, the ‘James Webb Extremely Deep Field.’  Then only a couple decades before the launch of the New Horizon, the optical components of the Neil Armstrong Array, the observatory complex on the far side Luna which housed unprecedentedly powerful instruments in all spectrums from radio to gamma, were used to create another new version.  Their mammoth fifty meter optical telescope, the construction and erection of which was only possible in the low gravity of the moon and would have torn itself apart on Earth, was used to stare at a new empty patch of sky for a cumulative total time of sixteen long months.

  The resulting image was simultaneously staggering, humbling, and flat out absurd.  The previous images were of a black space littered with many little dots of light, each indicating some distant galaxy, with every single smattering of photons indicating an expansive galaxy of no less cosmic significance than the humble Milky Way itself, an obscure little corner of which humanity called home.   But when the Neil Armstrong ‘Absurdly Deep Field’ image was processed, hardly any blank or empty patch of black space could be seen.  There were countless faint galaxies superimposed on more distant galaxies superimposed on even more distant galaxies, and so on, and so on, and so on.   The image gave the illusion of looking into the very big bang itself, and into the original cosmic inflation which immediately followed (which was not too far off from the truth), or of looking into the very fabric of the universe.  Tycho could spend (and had spent), many hours staring deeply into this image.  Part of its magic was that even blown up to the size of the wall, it still had resolution to spare; the image was still in perfect clarity.

  Johannes entered the room along with Maharet and Anaru.  “So Tycho, you’ve really been able to resolve Haven that well already?” Anaru asked.

  “Well,” Tycho replied, “Before the missing transmission and everything, I set up the telescope array to capture continuous and accumulating interferometric observation for almost two weeks straight.  I’ve gotten around to processing the data and the results so far have been, well, I think just stunning.”

  “You’ve become quite the astronomer Tycho!  I’m glad to see you’ve found something else to be so passionate about!” Maharet remarked, to which Tycho nodded with respectful deference.

  “Well… he replied.  There isn’t much Earth Science I can research out here…  Anyway, what I got was this.”  He thought the file up onto the wall screen, and there it was.  It was only about the size of a basketball against the wall, even on the eight meter across screen, but there it was nonetheless.   He ordered an enlargement, and it grew to about a meter across but was distinctly fuzzier.  It was larger, but of no greater resolution.  Regardless, one could clearly see the characteristic green and blue of a terrestrial planet with green and yellow continents standing out against the blue of the oceans.  The image was slowly rotating, though it was quite sped up from what it would have looked like naturally.

  “It’s… it’s so beautiful,” Maharet said quietly.  The image stirred in her feelings she couldn’t quite identify.

  “And just for comparison…” at that Tycho moved the image to the left side of the screen, and brought up a file image of Earth on the right, which was crystal clear, and appearing especially so by comparison.  The two slowly rotated side by side, “This is an image of Earth from the archives.”

  “They look so similar…” Anaru remarked.

  “Indeed, in fact I can already tell you from this image that we’ve quite clearly lucked out in a variety of ways with this planet.  Now, if you’ll give me a second…” his eyes narrowed slightly as he eliminated the image of Earth, and brought the rotating image of Haven back to the centre, but a bit larger now.  “Applying some filters, and a little guestimation…” he admitted, “here, look at this.”

  The image sharpened, but turned to an obviously artificial solid green against solid blue.  It stopped rotating, unfolded from the far side, and flattened out into a two dimensional image with a series of pie pieces cut out from the top and the bottom in order to more faithfully represent the surface of the sphere on the flat screen.  “This is my best guess as to the general configuration of the continents.  As you can see, there is one large accumulation of land there on the left, and kind of uh… rough, sideways oval of land on the right there.”

  On the left was what one might see if all of Asia, Australasia, Africa, and Europe were smushed together into one giant super-continent, and on the right was what one might expect if someone took the South American continent, stood a second one upside down on top of it, and then rotated the whole mass ninety degrees.  The result was large northern and southern oceans, but no large expanses of ocean near the equator itself.  This would make cross planet journeys much easier than they were when they were first embarked upon on Earth, where two thirds of the equator falls on open ocean.

  “Of course this is in no way precise when it comes to islands smaller than the size of say… Madagascar or Tasmania, and the coast lines are in no way precise… but I do stand by this general configuration of the continents.”

  “This is very impressive work Tycho!” Johannes offered his son in commendation.

  Tycho shrugged his shoulders, and then offered, “It’s just a question of patience and careful observation.”

  “Is there any way…” Johannes asked and wondered as he stroked his long white beard, “to make any guesses about the climate?”

  “Not really…” Tycho said at first, but then speculated: “Well you could say certain things…  For example I don’t think there would be as much chance on this planet for great ocean circulation currents like there apparently were in Earth’s ocean.  For Earth that meant a lot of artificially temperate regions which would otherwise have been much hotter or colder if it weren’t for those circulations… No,” Tycho decided while looking at the wall screen dramatized image of Haven, his arms folded with his right hand up rubbing his chin, “no, no there couldn’t be the same kind of currents, which might suggest that the equator would get hotter than we might expect and the poles might be colder than we’d expect. I could be totally off though, I’m not a climatologist. 

  “That reminds me though,” Tycho added, “I also noticed that Haven doesn’t tilt as much as Earth does.  Earth tilted twenty-three degrees because of an early collision with another celestial body, which resulted in the moon and the tilt…” he turned back to his audience and continued: “but Haven’s is only seven to ten degrees; that’s the best I can figure anyway.  That would mean less pronounced seasons which would just further contribute to a more extreme climate… I think.”

  “Is that going to be a problem?” Maharet asked.  Anaru had dabbled in planetary science in secondary school, but Maharet and Johannes had focused quite exclusively on things like history, psychology, sociology and philosophy.  As a result it was the best they could do to keep up with Tycho and Anaru as the conversation got more and more technical.

  “Well…” Tycho turned back to the screen and after a moment’s thought brought back up his original rotating image of Haven.  He stood aside so the three could see and then suggested, “I don’t think so.  Green is good, while yellow, grey, and white, are not so good.  The coastal regions all around this sort of sideways continent looks green with yellow in the middle of the continent.”

  “That yellow…” Anaru contemplated, makes me suspect a… a high plateau maybe?   With lower lands around the coast?”

  “Um… yeah I’d agree with that assessment,” Tycho replied.  “That larger continent though, it’s harder to tell.   I’d guess that it’s probably like North America or Eurasia in that it has inland seas and large lakes and things.   They could have high plains like the American prairies or the Asian steppes, no doubt there’d be mountain ranges…   But I think you can see pretty clearly that the northern and southern, oh… fifthish of the continent appears to be white which means ice, and while maybe having a minimal seasonality it would still basically be perpetual winter.”

  “Yeah… looks that way,” Anaru offered in agreement as he looked more carefully.

  “Tycho, could you send both of these images to my PAN?  I’d like to send them out to everyone and make sure they see it,” Maharet asked.

  “Be happy to,” Tycho replied with a smile.