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Titan's dense atmosphere has kept its surface a secret from astronomers. We
learned its secrets. In fact, the planetary scientist had hit it pretty damn
close. At about a hundred and eighty kilometers from the surface we hit a
layer of nitrogen that was at one Earth atmospheric pressure. At about twenty
kilometers from the surface, we hit a cloud of methane vapor. Just below the
clouds it was raining methane and the stresses on the warp field suggested
atmospheric pressures on the order of a thousand or more times greater than
that of Earth. Visibility was very poor and we couldn't see well enough to
navigate. Infrared didn't help, because there was none. The cloudy moon was
cold. We had to switch to radar navigation and if we came back, we would bring
a sonar system or something also. We did feel our way around with the radar
for a while until we found a lake. The lake was at about minus one hundred
seventy-seven degrees Celsius. The lake was liquid methane.
There were no Titans. I wasn't disappointed. In fact, I expected not to find
anything. But childhood aspirations and fantasies should be entertained every
now and then.
We oohed and ahhed as we stopped at Uranus and then Nep-tune. They weren't
necessarily close to each other, but with warpdrive at thirty times the speed
of light, no place in the solar system was that far away. Even the
Pluto-Charon system, which is about thirty astronomical units from Earth, is
pretty close at those speeds. The total trip to the three outer planets
including the ooh and ah time of about thirty minutes was only an hour or so.
It was obvious that things were going to be a lot different for the human
race, at least for those "with the need to know."
We spent some time at the Pluto-Charon system looking around. We actually
landed but didn't get out. There wasn't much to see. Pluto is an ice ball. The
humorous part of the trip was the fact that we had beaten the NASA
Pluto-Kuiper mission by several years. I thought about trying to track down
the approaching spacecraft to just take a look at it. Maybe some other time.
Our mission was to develop warp capabilities that would enable interstellar
travel. We had to continue with learning how to navigate over large distances.
So far, we had only been as far out as about thirty times the distance from
the Earth to the Sun. The distance to the nearest star is about hundred
thousand times that. We still had quite a
ways to go. At thirty times the speed of light, the trip to the nearest star
would take about two months.
We wandered around in the Kuiper-Belt a bit and then decided to travel through
the Oort Cloud and then the Heliopause. The Heliopause where the solar system
meets the rest of the galaxy is considered the edge of the solar system at
about a hundred astronomical units. There were some really neat plasma light
shows there. Our spectrum analyzer systems picked up radio noise centered
around the two to three kilohertz range and at awesome power levels. We pushed
through the Heliopause out to about three hundred AUs. I checked our
navigation and suggested to Tabitha that we bounce back to the Moon just to
make sure. The nonstop trip took about an hour and a half. We docked at the
moon for a few hours and had lunch at home.
By three o'clock that afternoon, we were ready to try for the solar
gravitational focus. According to
General Relativity any large massive body like the sun actually bends
spacetime enough in its near vicinity that the paths of light rays traveling
near that massive body are bent. In other words, the big object acts like a
very large lens. This fact has been verified experimentally in many different
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ways since 1919.
However, nobody has yet travelled to the focus of the large solar lens.
I had more reasons than just curiosity for traveling to the solar focus. Lets
digress for a second.
The largest telescope built by mankind so far is on the order of about a
hundred meters. It is a multiple mirror interferometer in Hawaii. The idea of
making large telescopes is to increase the resolution.
This means that the better the resolution the smaller the objects you can see,
farther away. The way to determine the smallest object seeable by a telescope
is to use the Rayleigh Criteria equation. The formula states that the minimum
resolvable object diameter is found as 2.44 times the wavelength of the light
(assume 550 nanometers for yellowish green light) times the distance to the
object (five light years or
4.55 x 10 meters) divided by the diameter of the telescope's primary optic.
Assuming that you want to
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image an Earth-like planet that has a diameter of about 12,000 kilometers,
Rayleigh's Criteria says that we need a telescope at least two kilometers or
more in diameter! The Hubble Space Telescope is 2.4
meters in diameter and the James Webb Space Telescope is only a few times
bigger than that. So we're a long way from imaging planets even around the
nearest star even if you consider the ground-based interferometer in Hawaii.
Now consider the solar focus. The diameter of the Sun is on the order of a
million kilometers. Using that as the diameter of the telescope primary in the
Rayleigh formula shows that we could see a hair up an ant's ass on planets
around stars out to a few tens of light years away. We could image planets
much much further out than that. Talk about the ultimate telescope. I had what
is known in amateur telescope making circles as "Big Aperture Fever" or BAF.
Even worse, my case was acute, chronic, and was a special strain called BMFAF.
You can guess what the MF stands for.
According to General Relativity, the solar focus should be somewhere between
five hundred and eight hundred AUs depending on the wavelength you wish to
view. The lensing effect works for all electromagnetic radiation not just
visible light. Anyway, imagine a telescope that large. All that would be
needed to use old Sol as the primary optic would be to place a detector at the
focus. I planned to add other optics to do some image correction and cleaning
up but the complete system is simple commercial adaptive optics and software.
The hard part is getting to the solar focus. The other hard part is lining the
star you wish to view up with the Sun and with the detector. The three objects
must form a straight line:
the star, then the Sun, then the detector. Assuming the solar focus is six
hundred AUs from the Moon
Base, then that means a trip time of about three hours to view one star. Of
course there would be multiple stars in the field of view of the telescope
depending on which eyepiece you use, but we were most immediately interested
in stars close to Earth. Now we're talking about maybe fifty stars sparsely [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]