At the oval office - chapter 5

The president stood with his back towards the doorway when Mr Jonathan, director of NASA entered, looking out the windows of the oval office. Black pants, white shirt, the blazer casually thrown over the back of the chair behind the presidential desk.
“Please enter Mr Jonathan”, the president said.
“Thank you Mr President, I’m very pleased …”.
“Please have a seat, I will be with you shortly”, he interrupted still standing by the window.
Mr Jonathan, the director of NASA took his seat in one of the classic sofas. It was actually his first time in the oval office, though he had had the pleasure of meeting the president on numerous occasions before. The president came over and sat on a seat beside him.
“I’m pleased to see you again Mr Jonathan”.
“So am I sir”, Mr Jonathan replied.
“Now”, the president continued, “please inform me on the current situation”.
“Well”, said Mr Jonathan, “It appears an unidentified object have put itself in orbit around Jupiter. It was, as you surely know by now, first observed by an American named Jacob who called a Mr Peter Schrim to get the observation confirmed and of course claimed. There where initially quite naturally some doubt about the sanity of the case, but none the less they checked it out some hours later at the Arecibo antenna in Puerto Rico, who in turn called the Europeans at the VLT in Chile to get a visual confirmation. Though they couldn’t find the light at VLT that Mr Jacob had claimed, there is at this moment no doubt of an active object emitting radio signals in the vicinity of Jupiter”. Mr Jonathan stopped.
“So”, the president said, “we just found out that we are not alone in our universe, an amateur astronomer sees a blue light engulfing Jupiter, he calls an observatory, they call their off shore friends and so forth, while I, the president, is the last man in the world to know.” A big smile filled the room as he pronounced the conclusion.
“It seems so Mr President. I’m a very sorry about that fact, however I my self was just recently noticed on the matter”. Mr Jonathan felt somewhat embarrassed. “And if I may, Sir, It is not established that the object is artificial”.
The president continued to smile. “But it is probable, isn’t it?”
“It is highly probable, Mr President. I can see no way about how it can be different”.
“And the signal in itself? Have we made anything out of it? Is it telling us something?”
“We are working on it Mr President, but so far it seems that the objects signal is just a large quantity of noise”. The director sighed slightly.
The president changed his position, putting one leg over the other.
“Ok, and then you tell me we have no resources available to go there?”
“Not as it is Mr President. Almost all of our budget and launch capability for the coming years is tied up the ongoing Mars flights”, Mr Jonathan said.
“The Europeans however, have a more favourable situation, and as we speak they are looking at possible plans for a manned mission to Jupiter”, he continued. “The decision hasn’t been made yet though”.
The president looked at Mr Jonathan. “Of course they will go Mr Jonathan, they would like nothing better than to beat us to it. But, aren’t they also in the midst of this Mars endeavour?”, the president replied.
“Oh yes, they are, very much so. In a way that’s the reason for them being able to send a ship Jupiters way. As we speak they are making plans to refit one of the scientific personnel vessels originally bound for Mars. The Koios”.
“The Koios? What is wrong with these people and their names”, the president laughed, “What does it mean Mr Jonathan?”
“Koios was one of the Greek titans Mr President. He was the son of Uranus and Gaia. That is Heaven and Earth. He was the Titan of wisdom. He was together with the rest of the titans overthrown by the Olympians led by Zeus. Or Jupiter as he is known in Roman times”.
“Well then”, said the president still smiling, “maybe it is a fitting name after all. So they will change their objective concerning Mars?”
“Not really, they are building several new shuttles bound for Mars. The one mentioned wasn’t to be launched for some time, there is apparently as I understand it enough time to replace it with a new craft”.
The president hesitated.
“So they will beat us to the greatest adventure of all time? They will send a man to Jupiter before us?”, the president became serious.
“Well sir”, Mr Jonathan continued, “up until a few days ago, the two ships now closing in on Mars was without doubt the greatest adventure of all time, sir. And in fact it took us quite some time and diplomatic skill to get us the larger part of the seats in those two flights just for that reason. It could only be solved by giving them most of the seats in the following cargo and scientific flights. One of which they now are refitting. So, Mr President, yes it looks like they are going to Jupiter, and we in fact are not.”
“How many are they sending?”, the president asked.
“Sir?”, Mr Jonathan didn’t got the question.
“How many men, Mr Jonathan?”
“The scientific shuttles designed for the Mars project carry three people. I would be surprised if they can change that in such a short time”, Mr Jonathan replied.
“Can we get a man of ours aboard?”
Mr Jonathan hesitated on the answer.
“With just three seats, they will certainly not be happy about us even asking”.
“Don’t we have one or two rides to collect at ESA if we want?”
“Not really Mr President, if you remember Mr President, we somewhat screwed them on the unmanned Venus missions a few years ago. I don’t think we have any more goodwill we can collect. Not if you take the Mars project in count”. The director of NASA was certain of this fact. The relations with ESA was rather strained, though not full blown hostile. After all Nasa and ESA were going hand in hand to Mars, just to beat the Chinese.
The President stood up and went to his desk.
“Well Mr Jonathan”, he said, “I guess I’ll be the one to have to call in some favours then. Start selecting your man Mr Jonathan, and set him on a plane to Europe. There must be an American on that flight. Get it done.”
“In fact, sir”, Mr Jonathan replied, “I think it will be a woman.”
“A woman aye?”
“Yes”.
“Very well then”, the president said, “my staff will follow you to your car”.
Mr Jonathan headed for the door when the president shortly hindered him.
“By the way Mr Jonathan”.
“Yes sir?”
“Who are they sending, the Europeans?”
“I don’t know their names yet, sir, but if they send the ones I think, it is a German and a French together with a Swedish astronaut”.
“A Swedish astronaut?”, the president smiled, “I guess there is a first time for everything”.
“In fact Mr President, if I remember correctly it is, at least, their second one”.
“Oh … well”. The president fell silent. “Anyway, it is probably him that they’ll pull out of the seat”.
“Probably so”, thought Mr Jonathan as he left the presidents oval office.

Globe - chapter 4

Four hundred thousand kilometres out from Jupiter, where the pale banded view of a planet with a red storm fills most of space, lays the path of Io. It is the innermost of the four large Galilean moons, a volcanic, draconic creature that orbits Jupiter inside the giant’s wide spanned magnetosphere, generating current.

Io is the golden daughter in the solar system. A young surface shifts in different shades of gold and yellow covering the iron sulphide core. Ever changing volcanoes spew out sulphide gasses and streams of basaltic lava from her infernal insides. Io can be said to be alive in a sense. Tidal forces twist it, and pull the crust and core, generating extreme heat, up to fifteen hundred Kelvin or more. She is the geologically most active object in the solar system, and unlike other moons in the outer regions, for this reason, she is much more than a dead body of ice.

In mythology Io was impregnated by the Olympic Zeus, taking every chance to betray his wife Hera. Now, in orbit far distant from Earth Io finds herself in wedlock in a tidal resonance with Jupiter, Europa and Ganymede. For every orbit Ganymede makes, being farthest from Jupiter, Europa manages two inside of it, and Io four in close orbit. This resonance tears Io and her mountains and core into dust. Then the Jovian magnetosphere lifts a tonne of this ionized matter and atoms off her every second into a thin atmosphere before these particles is pulled off the moon in a dusty trail that eventually escapes the planets system into the black of space.

Somewhere here between the moon and the planet, in the cauldron of gravitational energy and matter, in one specific moment a globe appeared. It cast around it an intense azure shadow of time and space, covering a golden moon and a red planet with a strange colour they had never seen before. It had come quite a long way, in what most people would say to be a very short time considering the distance travelled. It soon faded, but the globe remained, drawing energy from the cosmic resonance.

After some time the object started to move, finding its own trajectory, entering orbit, adding one to the sixty or so satellites circling over Jupiter’s clouded surface. Emitting a signal.

Sightings - chapter 3

Jacob's telescope followed stars in the sky. He saw Orion, the blue draped stars of the Pleiades and the hazy appearance of Andromeda. Then his vision was that of Jupiter and the four Galilean moons of Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Despite its size the planet appeared as a small disc, and the moons were no more than four glowing lights close to it. As he studied the planet a fifth light suddenly appeared among the moons. It was blue in essence, and shone for a few moments before disappearing. No larger than any of the moons

This was something that Jacob hardly could believe. The telescope was just a small refractor, but it didn’t matter, the light shouldn’t have been there. Of what he had seen before its sudden appearance there were no star in the field of vision. Perhaps it had been a small one. Perhaps he had just seen a distant nova he thought. Some minor star far away, blowing up, before him. But what would the chance be of that? For a short moment a though went though his head of it being a fifth moon. After all Jupiter had over sixty of them. But that also was not plausible. The four big ones made up almost the full hundred percent of the mass orbiting the gaseous globe. Also he had never heard of anyone else having such a vision. A human satellite then? No. That also, was out of the question. So he came back to the idea of a nova. But who could confirm this? Sure as anything he couldn’t do it himself. The light was gone now.

Jacob decided to call the university at the break of daylight. It was to late now anyway, and he didn’t have contacts among the strange people that he imagined populated the larger observatories.

The following day Peter Schrim received a call at his office at the university outside San Francisco. The man had hardly finished introducing himself before he tried to make some disoriented claim on a seeing a nova in the vicinity of Jupiter. At first Peter had taken him for a lunatic claiming that Jupiter itself had gone nova. But after he finally had managed to calm the fellow down, it became clear that the man had seen some blue light in his small refractor just the night before. When the conversation reached this point, Peter had more or less already reached for another phone. Here was an opportunity. Not to be missed. If it really were a nova it would make for a great article. Peter Schrim soon called some colleagues from the faculty who were on duty for a project at the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. He was sure his friends would be as excited about this as he was now.

***

That night, as Earth moved and the antenna came into position towards Jupiter the staff in Puerto Rico naturally felt alert and excited. This could be one of those happenings that every astronomer hopes for to happen once in her lifetime. Noise of the cosmic background filled the room coming out of the speakers placed on top of the rest if the receiving equipment, digital pictures showed on their screens. Then as the Arecibo got the planet focused the cosmic noise went right up, became higher, until the speakers screamed out in a high pitch note at the limit of the endurable.

Helena Maria - chapter 2

Helena Maria her self had been born during a thunderstorm rolling through the valleys of the Sierra Nevada mountains. This fortunate event had taken place in the late eighties. She had been brought up in a small village that commonly went by the name Canillas de Albaida. Even though being close to Nerja, the blues of the mediterranean and the sunny coasts of Spain, Canillas appeared a different world. Far from any hotels, packed beaches and any signs of more modern times, Canillas de Albaidas white houses clung to the slopes of Sierra Nevada like a last memory of a different Spain. An older nation of scorched earths, winegroves and olive trees. And of course an occational cactus fig. Therefore she came to spend most of her childhood close to the heavens of the Earth. Even at summer the air there was particularly clear and the sky shined like a sea of distant diamonds at night. From her home in the village she could also se the summer houses on the opposing slopes. They were more like traditional fincas really, small stone buildings for the farmers of old. One of these houses had been bought by an astronomer from somewhere far, and at certain nights he could be seen gazing the skies with his telescope. The villagers of course though he was spying on the village, and he was not very well welcomed in the small town, because they didn’t have any mind for the skies and could not comprehend the situation without a colorful explanation in their own words, and since they kept from talking to the man, and he from them, their relations didn’t improve much over the years, being as most people are that spend most of their lives worrying what will grow out of dust or not rather than what looks down from above. But Helena Maria was different, and when she saw the distant figure standing there, she learned her eyes and mind to travel the deph of the skies and dreamed away. In fact, it was on one of those nights, laying on her back after a short meeting with a surprisingly untallented youth, that she made a promise to devote her soul to the heavens. Now, had this been some hundred years earlier, this would have ment rigorous celibacy and silent contemplation upon Gods mysterious love rather than the sinful pleasures of mankind. But Helena Maria had another mind, though it included an occasional vision of love. Often short, too hasty, or delivered with a surprising deficiency of skill.

Her family had a branch in the Netherlands. A result of european power politics in the fifteenhundreds. So she eventually went there and studied astronomy at the university of Groningen. She wrote her master thesis on the evolution of quasars. She continued to Uppsala for her phD on the subject of Galactic evolution in the Local group – a time schedule for the next one billion years. She had since worked at different observatories until two years ago when she got a position, assigned at the european VLT - Very Large Telescope - in Chile. Since then she had been working with the tracking of stars like Betelgeuse when she didn’t manage other projects passing through the observatory array – which in reallity took a good portion of most of the time.

Helena Maria carried obvious spanish features, there was no question about that. And she was percieved as a beatuful woman by the average male population. She was blessed with a slender and curved body that few men failed to notice. It had been a close liaison since her early teens. Her slighly protruding jaw, her distinguished chest, and the long curly black hair, it was all quite spanish in nature. So was her temper. Her mother had said that it came from the thunderstorm the day she was born. Helena Maria beeing aware of all this, thought large stars like Betelgeuse to be suiting objects of her devotion. Red hot boiling titans, from a distance they could cope with her fluctuant passions.

She had just come down the stairs of the Yepun telescope, one of four mirrors at the array, when one of the staff members addressed her.
“Dr Helena”, the young man obviously came of scandinavian origin. His eyes sold him out. Fallen. No morals.
“Yes, that would be me”, she replied with an accent. “What can I do for you?”
“You have a call.”, he continued.
“Really? Who?” Few called.
“’Honestly don’t know”, he said. “It wasn’t I ...”.
Sound came from the orange earplugs dangling from his neck. It was playing loud and the minimilized sound found a nearby airwave. A few moments after the song came to Helena. The voice unmistakable. It’d been a long time though. She had played the song many times when she was as a younger version of her self. From a time draped in neon lights, short fluffy skirts and lace. Really more than a decade before her own generation. Still. The tiny voice came to her again. In an exquisit high falsetto going for the next octave in high tempo rainbow coloured notes.
“Don’t leave me this way ...”
“Never mind she said. I’ll be right there.”
“I had the call directed to your office.”
Helena gave a thankful smile in return. The young mans eyesight followed her as she left. Fallen. She would of course have to have him. Another day.

When she came in, the office met her covered in the slightly dimmed light she had left it in. Papers spread themselves across the desk. Over the shelves, the floor and much about everything else that offered a surface. She moved a recent report from ESA on Mars away while she sat her self down in a chair and picked up the phone. A diod blinked. The caller was still there. Beeing in the middle of the night this was obviously no social call. She saved a few breaths. And spoke with her most official voice, in slight accent.
“Yes, it’s Helena, with whom do I have the pleasure of talking at this late hour?”

View of a dying world - chapter 1

Helena Maria came off her shift at VLT. They had been monitoring the same objekt all night. Betelgeuse, the red giant, a thousand times larger than Sol, or at least it used to be. The mass was still about twenty times that of Earths sun. Its volume could fit about a billion ordinary sunlike stars within it. Yet Betelgeuse was a dying world. It had been known for some time now. The estimate was that the ball of gas would say its last farewells with quite a big bang somewhere between now and the beginning of the next millennia. It had been shrinking about twenty percent since the tracking started in the early nineties and showed no sign of stopping. While it was laying there on its dying bed it spewed out long trails of gas in the surrounding night. More than one and and a half solar mass had already left the star in this way.

These days you could actually see these trails on photographs, especially those taken by the staff at VLT. It had become their speciallity. With tecniques developed during the last thirty years or so you would catch detailed pictures of the titan. One of few that allowed it. It was all about size. Most other stars were still no more than points of light in the night. But with Betelgeuse astronomy had recently celebrated some victories. The past years Helena Maria and her team had taken pictures as sharp as those of the sun, showing sunspots and solar prominences in breathtaking detail, as media usually put it. And well, it wasn’t her team really, she was just a part of it. Still, she had some skill. And with their work the star had become a close friend in the minds of the people of Sol.

Betelgeuse was about to die young. It had been around less than ten million years and it would end its path well before its tenth birthday. A timespan for a stellar life that seemed like a single breath compared to Sol. Somehow this became a saddening thought for Helena. When you had worked with one single object for so long, almost every astronomer made a habit of seeing them as living entities. And of course they already had names. The undisputable sign of an individual. So you could say that nature had put it there, the premature feeling of loss, for a freind that was about to raise sails on the horizon.

Betelgeuse is a bright red titanic star at the shoulder of Orion. The suns burning red inferno dominates the neighbouring dark of space. Yet its ending will light up the skies of Earth, and the last lights will outshine that of her companion Luna. And when it is all over, It may be so that only a black massive nothing floats in the place where it once was. Pulling the surrounding dark closer to home.

Preludium

Kosmos is dark. Stark. An endless vast black. Fundamentally empty, yet full of something. Gas and matter holding together for no particular reason. Strictly unlogical and yet simple. Billions of suns glowing. Living and dying through passing eons. And so there is something strange about the relationship between distance and time in the universe. Not apparent at first, it soon becomes an unresolvable quest for the serious thinker. The celerity of light is said to limit the pace of matter. And the distance of neighbouring stars be unwalkable. Yet light must be fundamentally slow, and distances surprisingly short. For light uses time to reach our beholder. Minutes pass, weeks and lifetimes where it drifts. And still from distances said to be so far that he can not grasp the measure of remoteness a suns light strikes him. Brilliant as ever a jewel. Here Kosmos reveals itself. Uncountable neighbouring worlds, speaks with slow light. And the story goes like this. No one is ever alone in the fundamental void called space.