Chapter 23 Chapter 18 The Fountain of the Old Faithful

While Cosmos remained in the shadow of Halley's comet's polar region, careful detection work began.The outdoor control equipment that has just been operated by a single person has been quietly walking on both sides of the light and the backlight, and has recorded every interesting thing.After completing the preliminary investigation, groups of up to five scientists flew out in small boats to arrange equipment and instruments at various fixed points. The Lady Jasmine is a primitive spacecraft from the era of Discovery, which can only operate in a zero-gravity environment.Basically, it was a small spaceship used to carry people and transformed goods between the orbit of Cosmos and Mars, the surface of the moon, or the moons of Jupiter. Its master pilot cherished it very much, he complained bitterly. , flying around a small comet is slandering it.

When Captain Smith was absolutely certain that nothing surprising existed, at least on the surface of Halley, he flew off the ropes.As long as it moves no more than twelve kilometers, the universe will see another different world. This world no longer has only a faint dawn that lasts for several months, but a world that knows the cycle of day and night.When dawn comes, the comet slowly comes to life. As the sun slowly emerges from the jagged horizon, its rays pour down onto a bumpy surface formed by numerous small craters, most of which are extinct volcanoes, their narrow necks formed by inorganic salts. The hard shell is sealed.Nowhere on Halley is there such vivid color that biologists have mistakenly believed that this is where life originated, just as life first appeared on Earth from seaweed.Although they don't want to admit it, most of them haven't given up hope.

Small amounts of vapor from other craters floated in the sky, and with no wind to guide them, the vapors drifted straight up.There was usually an hour or two where everything was quiet; then, as the sun's heat seeped into the frozen interior, Halley would start belching steam, as Willis puts it: "Like a pack of whales." Although this metaphor is very realistic, it is not the most correct metaphor he has ever made.The material ejected by Harley to the light surface is not intermittent, it can last for several hours at a time, and these ejecta will not curl up, nor will they fall back to the ground, but will continue to rise into the air until They disappear in the mist they create.

At first, the science team handled the geysers with the same care that volcanologists would approach them in the most unpredictable circumstances of Eina or Vesuvius, but they soon discovered that the ejecta on Halley, although It looks scary, but it's actually pretty gentle and regular, spewing water as fast as water from a fire hydrant, and not too hot.Within seconds of the ejecta blowing out of the ground, it quickly turned into a mixture of vapor and ice crystals; Halley was enveloped in a permanent blizzard, and the air mass kept rising.Even at such a gentle rate, none of the water ever falls back to its source, and every time it orbits the sun, more of the comet's water is lost into the invisible vacuum of space.

After much lobbying, Captain Smith agreed to move the Cosmos to within a hundred meters of the Fountain of the Old Faithful, the largest of the Fountains toward the Light, with a ghastly spectacle of fuzzy white-gray mist , this cloud of mist is like a giant tree growing on the crater (this volcano seems to be one of the oldest volcanoes on the comet.) After a while, scientists climbed around the fountain and collected it (completely Sterile) mineral samples of various colors, and occasionally inserting thermometers and sample tubes into the upwardly rising stream of water, ice, and fog mixture.

"If it washes any of you into space," the captain warned, "don't expect to be rescued anytime soon. In fact, we'll probably wait for you to come back on your own." "What does he mean by that?" asked Mikhailovich, perplexed. As usual, Wellis knew the answer right away: "In the rules of the game in Heaven, things don't all go the way you expect them to; anything thrown off a Harley at the right speed usually follows the same trajectory, It would take a huge external force to change the situation. So, after one revolution, the two orbits will meet again, and you will be back where you were. Of course, that is seventy-six years later thing."

Not far from the Old Faithful there was another phenomenon that probably no one had predicted in advance.Scientists could hardly believe their eyes when they first observed this spectacle.This thing, which is several hectares in size and exposed to the vacuum of space, looks like an ordinary lake, the only special thing is that it is so black. Obviously, it couldn't be water; the only thing stable in this particular environment would be heavy organic oil or tar.In fact, Tunila Lake is more like asphalt, but it is more solid, only less than a millimeter thick on the surface where it is sticky.In such a small gravity environment, it must have passed a long period of time before it became as smooth as a mirror, maybe it has circled the sun several times.

After the captain stopped by Lake Tunila, the lake became one of the main tourist attractions on Halley Tube.Someone (no one confessed) found it possible to walk across this lake as easily as on Earth, because its surface is thick enough to bear the weight of a human foot in space.After a while, most of the crew members videotaped their walk on the lake. Captain Smith then inspected the airlock, found the walls covered with tar, and in great anger asked if there were any witnesses. "That's bad enough," he said through gritted teeth, "to get soot all over the spaceship. Halley's Comet is probably the ugliest place I've ever seen."

Since then, I have never traveled to Lake Tunila again.