INSTALLMENT 6: 13 NOVEMBER 80

 

PUBLISHED 20 JANUARY 81 FUTURE LIFE ^#25 COVER-DATED MARCH

 

Saturn, November 11th

And we beheld what no human eyes before ours had ever seen.

The world outside was strictly alien. Heavy fog had been slithering across Southern California for two days. Jack the Ripper would have felt right at home. A seventy-car daisy chain crackup on the Golden State Freeway had killed seven people the night before. Creeping through the hills past La Cañada-Flintridge, it was a scene Chesley Bonestell might have painted thirty years ago to illustrate an extrapolative article about the surface of Titan.

The time for patience with artists’ renditions was at an end: I was on my way to see the actual surface of Titan. What no human eyes had ever beheld.

Tuesday, November 11th, 1980. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. NASA’s Voyager I was on its way to its closest approach with Saturn; with Titan and Tethys; with Mimas and Enceladus and Dione; with Rhea and Hyperion and Iapetus.

In the Von Kármán Center, where the press hordes had begun clogging up since 7 AM, it was hurlyburly and business as usual. The women in the mission photo room were several decibels above hysterical: nothing but hands reaching in over the open top of the Dutch door demanding photo packets.

The press room was chockablock with science editors and stringers and lay reporters fighting to use the Hermes manuals lined up six deep. They were all there: the guys from Science News and Omni, the women from Scientific American and Time; heavyweight writers with their own word processors and Japanese correspondents festooned with cameras; ABC and NBC and CBS and Reuters and the AP. The stench of territorial imperative hangs thick in the crowd. I slip behind an empty typewriter and begin writing this column. An enormous shadow blocks my light. I look up over my shoulder at He Who Looms. “That’s my typewriter,” he says, of a machine placed there by JPL. What he means is that he got to it a little earlier than anyone else and has squatter’s rights, as opposed to a sharing configuration. I smile. “Need it right now? Or can I have about ten minutes to get some thoughts down?” He doesn’t smile. “I’m Mutual Radio,” he says; in his umbrage that is surely explanation enough. My eyes widen with wonder. “Are you indeed? I always wondered what Mutual Radio looked like. And a nice job they did when they turned you out.” I pull the paper out of the Hermes and vow that tomorrow I’ll schlep my own machine in. They were standing in line at the coffee urns. Everyone looked important.

Everyone was watching to make sure no latest photo slipped past. And the JPL press liaisons were hiding the nifty Saturn buttons.

And everywhere the talk was of the mysterious “spokes” radiating out across Saturn’s rings, of the ninety-plus ring discovery, of the inexplicable darkness covering Titan’s northern hemisphere.

In the course of human events, far fewer are real than we are led to believe. The staged press conference, the artificial happening, the protesting crowd that wanders somnolently until the television cameras cast an eye and zombie walkers begin chanting, waving their fists. Planned, choreographed, manipulated—to make us believe great things are going down. But they are not. It is sound, it is fury, and as usual it signifies nothing. But occasionally there are genuine moments during which history is being made.

This was written by one of The New Yorker’s unsigned editorial hands a number of years ago:

 

This is notoriously a time of crises, most of them false. A crisis is a turning point, and the affairs of the world don’t turn as radically or as often as the daily newspapers would have us believe. Every so often, though, we’re stopped dead by a crisis that we recognize at once as the genuine article; we recognize it not by its size (false crises can be made to look as big as real ones) but because in the course of it, for a measurable, anguished period—sometimes only minutes, sometimes hours, rarely as much as a day—nothing happens. Truly nothing. It is the moment of stasis between a deed that has been performed and must be responded to and the deed that will respond to it. At a false turning point, we nearly always know, within limits, what will happen next; at a true turning point, we not only know nothing, we know (something much more extraordinary and more terrifying) that nobody knows. Truly nobody.

 

There are times when the world collectively holds its breath. The assassination of John Kennedy, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the day the Vietnam War ended, the Manson family murders, the Hungarian uprising in November 1956, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Real things were happening, the world was changing; the breath paused in our bodies.

And this is one of those timeless moments. Something real, something urgent, something important is happening.

The human race is fumbling toward the light through outer darkness; and there is a feeling here of movement, of genuine wonder. The sense of isolation dissipates.

The press briefing is held half an hour earlier than expected and the room is jammed to the walls. A full-size replica of the Voyager bird dominates the left side of the briefing auditorium. The television networks have their Martian war-machine cameras ranged across the rear of the seating area behind the press representatives from major news outlets and, seemingly, from every Podunk Gazette in the country. Snatches of conversations in French, German, Japanese. The planet Earth is gathered here to know!

The recap of the previous day’s findings leaves mouths gaping. They have discovered something on Tethys. Is it a crater? No, the albedo indicates it’s a hill. The NASA spokesman calls it “a heck of a hill”—hundreds of kilometers across. But only time and greater resolution of the photographs will tell.

Brad Smith, leader of the imaging science team, cannot conceal his amazement as he reports that at least two eccentric rings have been found in the mass of circulars casting their shadow on Saturn’s cloud-masses. He says they had no reason to expect such a thing, that it defies all the known laws of ring mechanics. What he doesn’t say is that if every Bible Belt fundamentalist who believes we never actually went to the Moon, that we flew over to Glendale and shot all that stuff in a movie studio, could be here, to see what these people are doing, what is being sent back minute by minute over a distance of 930,000,000 miles, they might begin to understand that God was too busy creating esthetics to worry about putting the solar system together.

It is all so complex, so bewilderingly intricate, even the best minds in the room are finding it difficult to keep up with the new discoveries:

The rings, for instance.

A constant revelation. They simply don’t know what keeps the rings separated. General knowledge, since the Dutch mathematician Christian Huygens discovered the true shape of the rings in 1659, has contended that—at most—there were five. (The state of our knowledge, and the breakneck acceleration in what we’ve learned, is expressed in this absolutely latest-thinking from THE WORLD WE LIVE IN [1955], edited not only by the staff of Life magazine, but by the renowned author of THE UNIVERSE AND DR. EINSTEIN, Lincoln Barnett: “Although Saturn’s three concentric rings rotate in a circle 171,000 miles across, they are only a few inches thick. The middle ring, largest and brightest of the three, is 16,000 miles wide and separated from the outer by a 2000-mile gap.” That latest-state-of-the-art in 1955 was a caption accompanying a Chesley Bonestell painting of Saturn’s three rings.)

As of this November 18th the Voyager team has isolated almost 1000 rings; and the estimates go as high as 10,000. The rings have rings; the rings’ rings have rings; and the rings’ rings rings have ringlets.

But what keeps them separated…?

The NASA News backgrounder on the mission, dated just October 28th, says this: “At least six rings surround Saturn. From the planet outward they are designated D, C, B, A, F and E. Divisions between the rings are believed to be caused by the three innermost satellites, Mimas, Enceladus and Tethys. The Cassini Division, a space between the B and the A ring, is the only division clearly visible with a small telescope from Earth.”

But here it is less than two weeks later and we sit in the morning briefing and hear that the Cassini Division is anything but empty. Rings within rings within rings. And tiny satellites, acting as “sheepdogs” (Jerry Pournelle’s wonderful term for them), seem to be holding the rings apart, seem to be serving as outriders in this complex, astounding system of cosmic detritus.

Science fiction writer Greg Bear asks Smith if he has any random guesses as to how old the rings are, how stable they are, and how long they’ll stay in this wonderful sequence. We expect another humorous “well, I can’t really say for sure” response, but Smith replies with force, “They’re four and a half billion years old, they’re very stable, and they’ll be there till the sun enters its red giant phase.” Everyone is impressed.

No one can even begin to grasp what four and a half billion years means in terms of waiting time at the airport, but it is clearly longer than next Thursday at 4:15 PM.

 

Humanity is only 1.3 billion miles from the surface of Titan and one of the members of the press corps asks a dumb question. He didn’t realize the NASA spokesman was making a subtle joke. An ingroup astronomical joke. His question is answered politely, but everyone in the room thanks God it was not s/he who had asked the dumb question. To look like a schmuck in the same room where Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto, sits listening, is to put oneself forever beyond the pale. Five minutes later someone else asks a question to which the response is, “That’s a very good question, a very important question,” and He Who Asked could, at that moment, be elected President of the World.

I am an eyewitness to history, and I make a mental note to thank Jerry Pournelle for getting me VIP credentials; I am far out of my depth, but I am at the eye of the hurricane and I owe thanks to Jerry.

Slides from images sent back by the Voyager are flashed on the screen. Photos of the Cassini Division separating the A and B rings.

The scientists admit that traditional celestial mechanics cannot account for the phenomenon of their eternal separation from one another. Not even the “sheepdog” satellites can be adequately explained, the way they work, they way they push up and pull down the ice particles, speed them up and slow them down, keep them circling in their intricate cosmic pavane.

But they seem to revel in their lack of explanations. They suppose this, and they postulate that, and they are like kids who have been given a glimpse of a new toy with which they can play for years to come. It is the best part of this extraordinary game that has thrown four hundred million dollars worth of Voyager I and II tinkertoy into eternal darkness. It is the most salutary part of the rigorously analytical intelligence: it loves to have been fooled, it loves to be surprised.

They realize they have made pronouncements of What the Laws of the Universe Are and are being proved wrong minute-by-minute. But they don’t defend what they said in error; they admit, they recant, they rush to say no, here’s what it is now, and here’s what it looks like now, and look at that, and look at that! One can only love them for it.

They talk a great deal about seeing what’s coming in with “Terrestrial eyes” and with “Jovian eyes.” What they mean is that we are too ethnocentric, and when Voyager II made its encounter with Jupiter sixteen months ago, they interpreted what was relayed back through eyes and intellects chained to a Terran horizon for millions of years. Now, with bemused embarrassment, they admit to early misinterpretations of visual data because everything was viewed as if it were of the Earth…out there. But Ganymede brought important lessons about seeing with new eyes. Yet it’s happening again—with the difference that “Ganymedian eyes” are being added to the viewing of the Saturn system. Nonetheless, how miraculous: seeing with the eyes of aliens. Knowing that what is revealed is only partially real, that much of the “reality” is merely shadow, as seen through human organs not yet completely retooled for new vistas.

These are human beings transcending their limitations, going to a new realm of perception not through the duplicity of drugs and fuzzy sophomoric metaphysics that demean the purity of Zen rigors, but through confrontation with the pragmatic universe, through hard analysis of the laws of that physical universe, no matter how anomalous and labyrinthine they may be.

Angie Dickinson appears in the briefing auditorium and the PIO nabobs begin whirling like dervishes. She is there strictly as an “interested bystander” I’m told, but she gets more attention than Clyde Tombaugh. I sigh deeply.

 

Voyager has discovered three new satellites: S-13, S-14 and S-15.

And they have “undiscovered” one that has been there since 1966.

Quote from the current edition of THE WORLD ALMANAC AND BOOK OF FACTS, 1980 (page 761):

 

Saturn has 10 satellites, the 10th having been announced by the French astronomer, Audouin Dollfus, in Dec. 1966. The new satellite is a few thousand miles outside Saturn’s ring system, but it is so faint that there is some doubt as to its existence.

 

Quick thinking, WORLD ALMANAC! Dollfus’s tenth satellite, which he called Janus after the two-faced Roman deity, does not exist. Poor Dollfus. It simply ain’t there. Every science fiction story using Janus as its locale is now down the chute. (I gloat. I am not a science fiction writer, no matter how my work is mislabeled by anal retentive pigeonholers—I have written so few stories that required a scientific education that I have nothing to apologize for. I feel sorry for Hal Clement and Isaac and Poul and Larry Niven. Only Andre Norton can get away with it: her JUDGMENT ON JANUS was written in 1963, before Dollfus’s gaffe, and she made her Janus an alien world in another star-system.)

The bird makes its closest approach to Titan, largest satellite in the Solar System and the only one with a discernible atmosphere, at 9:41:12:12 Tuesday night and the final hope that a view through to the naked surface will be possible…vanishes. One of the scientists, who bet a case of cognac that a peep would be possible, loses the wager. And we all lose. Titan is covered with smog. Clouds of liquid nitrogen vapor, but maybe the atmosphere isn’t a nitrogen mixture. Hydrogen cyanide is discovered; there may be an ocean of liquid nitrogen down there; if such an ocean exists, the methane icebergs would sink to the bottom.

Much of the human race would not spend four dollars to journey to Los Angeles, blanketed by photochemical smog; but the species in toto has traveled one and a half billion miles to visit a place with even worse smog.

And on the evening news as I drive home, talk of the Saturn flyby appears at the bottom of the broadcast. Top spot dwells on the war between Iran and Iraq.

I sigh deeply.

 

Wednesday the 12th of November, 1980. The 10:30 AM briefing on the day of the main events:

2:16 PM Closest approach to Tethys (258,000 miles).

3:45 PM Closest approach to Saturn (77,174 miles above clouds).

3:48 PM Six photos of the new satellite, S-11.

5:42 PM Closest approach to Mimas (55,168 miles).

5:50 PM Closest approach to Enceladus (125,840 miles); Enceladus’ radius is 260 kilometers, 162 miles; reception time of the images back here on Earth: 7:15 PM.

7:39 PM Closest approach to Dione (100,122 miles).

9:45 PM Voyager crosses the ring plane on its outbound leg.

10:21 PM Closest approach to Rhea (44,744 miles); Rhea’s radius is 750 kilometers, 466 miles.

Quote from Star & Sky magazine, November 1980:

 

An object like Saturn’s satellite Rhea, which appears as a minute speck in any earthly telescope, can be used to illustrate what the Voyagers are expected to achieve. No surface features on Rhea have ever been seen. The photos from Voyager I will include images of Rhea displaying about 20 percent of its surface to nearly one-mile resolution—equivalent to the best Earth-based telescopic photographs of our own satellite, the moon.

 

A quick and infallible test of the imagination quotient of your friends and lovers. Quote the above; if s/he says, “So what?” or “What good is that?” ask for your ring back and walk away fast.

The briefing is even more jammed than yesterday’s. I sit with Dick Hoagland of Star & Sky so he can explain everything to me. I need to know what albedo means. I’m sure he’ll be tickled to explain the ABC’s of celestial mechanics to a no-neck scientific illiterate. (At least I don’t have to arm-wrestle Mutual Radio for a typewriter. I’ve brought my own Olympia portable—the one with the Mickey Mouse decal on the case—and I snag a desk formerly occupied by Peter Schroeder of Dutch television and radio. It’s a good thing I got there early: Tuesday’s smash&grab for mission photos and space to bat out news copy has intensified. One yahoo caught rustling a CBS word processor is lynched before our eyes.)

Opening remarks by Voyager Project Manager for JPL, Ray Heacock, reinforce the sense of wonder. They have been incredibly lucky overnight. During the Titan-Earth occultation period—11:12 to 11:24 PM—there has been rain at tracking station 63 in Spain. It started and stopped during a time when, had the spacecraft not been measuring atmospheric properties as the radio signal began to fade, we would have lost masses of valuable data. But it didn’t matter during occultation.

More wonder: Heacock says, with an impish grin, that they made an error in timing: because they didn’t know precisely where Titan would be (or something like that), the Voyager made the ring plane crossing 49 seconds earlier than expected. Everyone laughs. The bird has been in transit for three years and the biggest miscalculation is 49 seconds. The next time I call the telephone company about a repair and they tell me it can’t be done, I will tell them anything can be done.

I smile with pride at my lovely species. We ain’t so goddam dumb after all.

(Middle of the day Tuesday, a slow time with everybody out to lunch, I went to the astonishing botanical gardens of the Huntington Museum with Jane Mackenzie and Bob Silverberg. We wandered through alien terrain straight out of a 1936 Frank R. Paul cover from Amazing Stories, a desert garden of a million kinds of seemingly extraterrestrial cacti. And Bob ruminated. “I was standing next to one of those scientists at the back of the auditorium during briefing,” he said, “when he was describing something incredibly arcane; and I looked at him. I was looking at something like 180 I.Q. and I knew that man was smarter than I. Far smarter. And I’m smart.”)

The briefing goes on. Norman Ness, from the Goddard Space Flight Center, principal investigator on the magnetic field team, explains how the Voyager passed through Saturn’s bow shock wave at 4:50 PM when Titan was inside the magnetic field envelope of the planet. He speaks of the solar wind, the flow of ionized gas given off by the sun that hisses through the solar system. There is no poetry in the words…only in the way he speaks of it. Norman Ness barely realizes he has looked on the face of the Almighty.

The photos we’re seeing are four times as detailed as what came in over the tv screens real-time. Television’s scanning pattern permits only one-quarter of the information contained in the photos sent by the Voyager’s imaging systems to reveal itself when we see it on the screen. Even so, the details are remarkable.

But most remarkable of all is the revelation that three components of the F ring seem to defy the laws of pure orbital mechanics: they are braided. Such a thing cannot be, yet we look at the photographs and we see that indeed, the rings do twine. Brad Smith of the University of Arizona is totally at a loss to explain it. He cannot even make a joke. This is the big time, something never encountered before. He looks like a man stunned by the hammer. He says that of all the improbables he might have postulated, even to the inclusion of eccentric rings, which have now been verified, the braiding is so far off the wall he could not even have conceived of it.

We stare at the pictures.

The rings twine around each other. The room falls silent for a moment, we hold our breath; we are living in one of those special moments when something is happening, something important.

The celestial engineer has been cutting capers again.

A photo of Mimas taken at 5:05 AM Pacific Standard Time from a range of approximately 400,000 miles shows an impact crater 80 miles in diameter. It shows a rebound peak God only knows how high in the center of the structure. The crater is more than a quarter of the diameter of the whole damned iceball. It may be the largest impact crater, relative to the size of the object struck, in the solar system. What will the shock pattern on the other side of Mimas look like? What will it tell us about how big a projectile can be before it blows something like our moon to smithereens?

That’s why you asked for your ring back and walked away fast when the feep didn’t understand.

During the press conference—between 10:53 and 10:56 AM—the mechanism making search-sweeps for new satellites apparently discovered S-16. Later it turns out to be S-10.

Patrick Moore, he who knows more about our moon than any one else writing about Luna, asks Smith about a small satellite that might be controlling the inside boundary of the C ring. Smith gets an expression that is the equivalent of crossing one’s fingers and responds that he hopes it’s there…because if it’s there it will go a long way to explaining how the rings hold together. He says they will modify the Voyager II search patterns to locate it…if it’s there.

It becomes clear that the photos we’re being given for publication are merely bullshit PR. That as soon as this circus leaves town the scientists upstairs can employ full computer time to analyze the pictures instead of putting together “pretty pictures” for the press.

And that’s exactly what happens.

Within two days, they have analyzed so much of the material that they’ve revealed a wind on the surface of Saturn that blows at 1100 miles per hour. If that wind were here on Earth it would be blowing in a steady line from Philadelphia to Buenos Aires.

And then comes the explanation for the anomalous “spokes” that were seen radiating out through the rings. It is an explanation so unbelievable that it can only be termed a Star Wars special effect.

As the Voyager fell through the ring plane on the 12th, heading for its closest encounter with Saturn, a secondary experiment on board—“The Planetary Radio-Astronomy Receiver”—picked up enormous bursts of energy—static—identical to terrestrial thunder storm noises…but a million times stronger than anything in the solar system.

The bursts of energy coincided with the mysterious “spokes” seen in the rings.

Putting the results together, the Voyager team has tentatively come up with an awesome mechanism operating within the ring, namely, electrical discharges—lightning—occurring over tens of thousands of kilometers.

The Voyager was literally being shot at by Saturn as it flew past. The “spokes” seem to be—hold your breath—enormous linear particle accelerators!

As best I can explain it to you (and most of this comes from Dick Hoagland), here’s what causes this phenomenon that cannot be explained within the parameters of known celestial mechanics.

The density of material in the B, or center, ring is the highest. The highest number of, literally, icebergs per cubic mile. Because of the inevitability of Keplerian mechanics, the bergs closest to Saturn are orbiting faster. Any ice object with an eccentric orbit, even a few meters of eccentricity, will collide with other bergs. Because of the brittleness and cold of this ice they naturally fracture producing, well, producing chips off the old block. Then those fragments collide and chip again and again, getting smaller and smaller. These collisions continue in a never-ending rubble-producing process.

But. When this occurs in Saturn’s two-hour shadow, when the fragments sail out into sunlight the smallest particles—micron-size, perhaps—are charged up by interaction with solar ultraviolet light and, because like charges repel as any dummy clearly knows, they literally try to get away from the rings. Producing a levitating cloud of charged ice crystals elevated above the average ring plane who knows how far…several miles to several thousand miles.

Grabbed by Saturn’s magnetic field (magnetic fields and electrical charges, Hoagland assures me, go hand-in-hand), they are lined up in a linear feature tens of thousands of kilometers long, stretching from the outer edge of B ring in toward Saturn. Straight and narrow as a flashlight beam. These appear in the optical images as “spokes” which rotate anomalously around the planet defying all explanation. At this moment.

Give them a week more.

And so these electrified ice crystals apparently discharge along the length of the spoke creating, in effect, the Solar System’s largest radio antenna as well as a natural linear particle accelerator.

Even I, scientific illiterate, aware of the breakthroughs in particle physics that have come from such terrestrial plants as the Batavia, Illinois proton synchrotron, can extrapolate what it would mean to harness that “spoke” mechanism to aid us in discovering precisely of what matter is composed, how it works, how it came to be.

Explain that to the feep who said, “So what?”

I overload. I cannot contain any more new information. I pack it in and lie down and turn on the radio.

The news is all taken up with how high the stock market has jumped with Reagan’s latest fiscal pronouncements. And the war between Iraq and Iran. I close my eyes and slap the button off on the radio.

I sigh deeply. Ain’t we a wonderful species.