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| 3001 The final Odissey |
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Страница 40 из 91 mission before the final disaster. Though he and Bowman were perfectly aware that 7794 was merely a lifeless, airless chunk of rock, that knowledge scarcely affected their feelings. It was the only solid matter they would meet this side of Jupiter, and they had stared at it with the emotions of sailors on a long sea voyage, skirting a coast on which they could not land. It was turning slowly end over end, and there were mottled patches of light and shade distributed at random over its surface. Sometimes it sparkled like a distant window, as planes or outcroppings of crystalline material flashed in the Sun... He remembered, also, the mounting tension as they waited to see if their aim had been accurate. It was not easy to hit such a small target, two thousand kilometres away, moving at a relative velocity of twenty kilometres a second. Then, against the darkened portion of the asteroid, there had been a sudden, dazzling explosion of light. The tiny slug -- pure Uranium 238 -- had impacted at meteoric speed: in a fraction of a second, all its kinetic energy had been transformed into heat. A puff of incandescent gas had erupted briefly into space, and Discovery`s cameras were recording the rapidly fading spectral lines, looking for the tell-tale signatures of glowing atoms. A few hours later, back on Earth, the astronomers learned for the first time the composition of an asteroid`s crust. There were no major surprises, but several bottles of champagne changed hands. Captain Chandler himself took little part in the very democratic discussions around his semi-circular table: he seemed content to let his crew relax and express their feelings in this informal atmosphere. There was only one unspoken rule: no serious business at mealtimes. If there were any technical or operational problems, they had to be dealt with elsewhere. Poole had been surprised -- and a little shocked -- to discover that the crew`s knowledge of Goliath`s systems was very superficial. Often he had asked questions which should have been easily answered, only to be referred to the ship`s own memory banks. After a while, however, he realized that the sort of in-depth training he had received in his days was no longer possible: far too many complex systems were involved for any man or woman`s mind to master. The various specialists merely had to know what their equipment did, not how. Reliability depended on redundancy and automatic checking, and human intervention was much more likely to do harm than good. Fortunately none was required on this voyage: it had been as uneventful as any skipper could have hoped, when the new sun of Lucifer dominated the sky ahead. III THE WORLDS OF GALILEO (Extract, text only, Tourist`s Guide to Outer Solar System, v 219.3) Even today, the giant satellites of what was once Jupiter present us with major mysteries. Why are four worlds, orbiting the same primary and very similar in size, so different in most other respects? Only in the case of Io, the innermost satellite, is there a convincing explanation. It is so close to Jupiter that the gravitational tides constantly kneading its interior generate colossal quantities of heat -- so much, indeed, that Io`s surface is semi-molten. It is the most volcanically active world in the Solar System; maps of Io have a half-life of only a few decades. Though no permanent human bases have ever been established in such an unstable environment, there have been numerous landings and there is continuous robot monitoring. (For the tragic fate of the 2571 Expedition, see Beagle 5.) Europa, second in distance from Jupiter, was originally entirely covered in ice, and showed few surface features except a complicated network of cracks. The tidal forces which dominate Io were much less powerful here, |
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