Chapter 15 Chapter Eleven Lying

Before van den Berg could once again turn his attention to Mount Zeus, he spent months concentrating on Gnemede, and he had to leave his main office at the Dadano base for weeks at a time to scout out Jill. The track route run by Gemas (the god of the underworld). Since Jupiter exploded, Gnemede, Jupiter's third and largest moon, has been radically changed, and continues to be.The new sun that melted the ice on Europa is not so powerful here, because it is far away from Jupiter (about 4,000 kilometers), but it is enough to produce a warm climate in the center of the side that always faces Jupiter. Between forty degrees north latitude there are small, shallow oceans, some as large as Earth's Mediterranean Sea.The maps drawn by the Voyager spacecraft in the twentieth century are now completely out of date, and due to the tidal forces caused by the two closest moons, the melting of the permafrost zone of Gnymede and the tectonic changes It moves occasionally, making it a cartographer's nightmare.

But these factors also make it a paradise for planetary engineers.It is the only place other than dry and unexplored Mars where humans can roam freely under the open sky without any protection.Gurneymede has wide waters, all the chemicals needed to form life, and had warmer weather than Earth when the magic star appeared. Even better, there is no need to use a spacesuit that wraps the body airtight, because the air here is still unbreathable, but its concentration is enough for people to use simple masks and oxygen to survive.In a few decades (although microbiologists don't know the exact date, but they think so) even these equipment will be unnecessary, because on the surface of Gurneymede they found some oxygen-producing Most of the bacteria have died, but some are still growing and multiplying; and the curve of the oxygen index slowly rising in the local atmospheric analysis map is the first information they proudly show to all visitors to the Dadano base.

For a long time, Vandenberg paid close attention to the data sent back by the Europa 6 satellite, hoping that one day when the Europa 6 orbited and soared over Mount Zeus, the cloud cover would change just enough for him to see clearly.He understands that this is not easy to happen, but as long as there is a glimmer of hope, he has no intention of doing other research.This question is not very urgent, because he has many more important things to do at hand, not to mention that the final result may be some mundane and uninteresting answers. However, the Europa VI satellite failed suddenly, almost certainly due to an accidental collision of a meteor.On Earth.Many thought Victor Willis had made a joke of himself by accepting an interview with "Euromania" (replacing the vacancy left by UFOmania from the previous century, but being a little overly active) .Some of them thought the Europa failure was a deliberate act by the Earthlings, a fact that had never bothered them because Europa VI had operated uninterrupted for fifty years, almost twice as long as it was designed to.Willis acknowledged this, but overturned other controversies from those who thought so, but the consensus was that he should not have spoken publicly in the first place.

Van den Berg liked how his colleagues described him as a "stubborn Dutchman" and tried to do so, seeing the failure of Europa 6 as an irresistible challenge.It is quite impossible to build a replacement satellite, the cessation of which has long been seen as a great relief, for the protracted and protracted exploration effort. What could replace the Europa 6 satellite?Vandenberg sat down to consider his options.Since he is a geologist rather than an astrophysicist, it took him many days to find out that the answer was already in front of him when he arrived. The Dutch of South Africa is recognized as the best curse language in the world, and even an elegant conversation can make innocent listeners feel uncomfortable.Van den Berg paused his work for a few minutes, then he called Tima Observatory, which was located exactly on the equator, vertically above the tiny, blinding disk-shaped magic star.

Astrophysicists who care about the most magnificent matter in the universe tend to take special care of things as small and trivial as the planets, but at this extreme edge everyone helps each other out, and Dr. Weikenz is not only interested, but also Very compassionate. The establishment of the Tima Observatory has only one purpose, which is why a base is established on Gnemede, that is, to study magic stars, not only for pure scientists, but also for nuclear engineers, meteorologists, and oceanographers. scholars, and even political scientists and philosophers are of great significance.It is indeed amazing and disturbing to many that there is something that can turn a planet into a sun, and it would be very useful for humans to understand all the processes that humans may need to imitate one day, or prevent this from happening.

Therefore, for more than ten years, Tima has observed the magic star with various possible instruments, continuously recorded its spectrum through the entire electromagnetic field bandwidth, and actively used the 100-meter dish radar to hang through the small crater to detect it. for probing. "Yes," Dr. Weikenz said, "We also observe Europa and Io often, but our focus is always fixed on the magic star, so we can only see them for a few minutes when Europa and Io pass by. And Dr. Fan, the Mount Zeus on Europa that you care about happens to be on the light side, so we have been unable to see it.”

"I understand," said van den Berg impatiently, "but can't you just move the detector beam a bit so you can see Europa before it comes around the line? Just ten or twenty degrees will allow you to see it." The area on the light side." "It only takes one degree to deviate from the magic star and see the whole picture of the other side of Europa in orbit, but then it is at least three times farther away, so we only have one percent reflected power. But There's always hope, and we'd love to try it out, please let me know the frequency, wavelength range, polarization, and whatever you guys in charge of remote sensing think would be helpful. It won't take long for us to get that The phase conversion network that detects how many degrees the electric wave is reversed is set up. I am not sure about the others. We have never thought about this problem, although perhaps we should have done it long ago. In any case, except for ice and water, What else do you hope to find on Europa?"

"If I had known," said Van den Berg cheerfully, "I wouldn't have asked you for help, would I?" "When you publish the research results, don't forget my credit. It's a pity that my name starts with W, and I always rank last. You are just ahead of me." This was a year ago, and the long-distance scanning effect is still not good enough, and the method of moving the detection radio waves to detect the light-facing side of Europa before the rendezvous has proved to be much more difficult than imagined.But in the end the result came out, the computer absorbed and digested the data, and van den Berg became the first human being to observe the mineralogy map of Europa's Occult Surface.

As Dr. Weikenz speculates, Europa is mostly ice and water, with occasional sulfur deposits dotted with basalt veins.But there are two anomalies. There is one image over Europa that looks like it has been artificially manipulated, a perfectly straight line, two kilometers long, showing hardly any radar reflections.Van den Paig gave this question to Dr. Weikenz and let him find out the answer, because he was only interested in Mount Zeus. And another anomaly that took Vandenberg a long time to confirm, because only madmen (dedicated scientists, to put it mildly) would believe that these things are possible; even now, although every document has been done The most precise request, but he still has doubts about it, and he doesn't even want to think about his next move.

When Dr. Weikenz called and anxiously told him that his reputation had spread on the information desk, Vandenberg replied vaguely that he was still looking for answers, and finally he couldn't put it off any longer. "There is nothing exciting," he told his unsuspecting colleague, "only a rare form of quartz, and I am trying to find something like it in samples from Earth." This was the first time he had lied to a scientist he worked with, and it made him very unhappy. But don't do this, is there any other way?