Chapter 3 Chapter 3 Rama and Sita

The Academy of Space Advisors held an unusual meeting.The meeting was brief and intense.In the 22nd century, the positions of power held by those old and conservative scientists still cannot be shaken.Of course, it is doubtful whether this kind of problem can be solved after all. To make matters worse, the current Executive Chairman of the Academy of Space Advisors is Professor Davidson, the famous astrophysicist.Anything smaller than the Milky Way was of little interest to Professor Davidson, and never bothered to conceal his prejudices.Although he had to admit that ninety percent of his science was based on observations from instruments in orbit, he was not at all happy about it.On at least three occasions during his illustrious career, satellites were launched specifically to prove one of his favored theories, with exactly the opposite result.

The agenda is clear.Rama is certainly an unusual object, but is its study necessary?It will be gone forever in a few months, and the time will never come again. For a rather dire expense, a space probe about to be launched from Mars to beyond Uranus could be retrofitted on a high-velocity trajectory to meet Rama.A rendezvous is out of the question; it would be the fastest fly-by on record, with the two passing head-to-head at 200,000 kilometers per hour and having only a few minutes to meet Rama. Effective observation and true close-up photography is less than a second away.But as long as the appropriate equipment is selected, this time is enough to clarify many problems.

Although Professor Davidson also has prejudices against the Uranus exploration plan, it has been approved after all, and he sees no reason to spend more money to do worse things.He went on to detail how tracking asteroids would be a fool's errand, and that the urgent task was to install a high-resolution interferometer on the moon to confirm once and for all the revived Big Bang origin theory. This was a serious tactical error, since the three most ardent advocates of the "revised steady state" theory were also members of the Council of Advisors.They implicitly agree with Davidson that tracking asteroids is a waste of money.However……

He was rejected by one vote. Three months later, a space probe called Theta was launched from Mars' innermost "moon" Phobos, one of Mars' moons.The voyage is seven weeks, and its instruction is to turn on the full power five minutes before the rendezvous, and release a group of camera cabins at the same time, and circle around Rama, so that photos of Rama can be taken from various angles. Rama's first images were taken from 10,000 kilometers away.The entire human race ceased other activities for it, and a tiny cylinder appeared simultaneously on the screens of a billion televisions, growing bigger by the minute.At this time, no one considered Rama to be a natural object any more.

This is a very perfect cylinder, which seems to be processed by a lathe with a center distance of 50 kilometers.Its two end faces are quite flat except for some small protruding components near the center, with a diameter of 20 kilometers.Since there is no concept of scale from a distance, Rama looks like a domestic boiler. Rama fills the entire screen.Its surface is dark gray, colorless like the moon, and has no recognizable marks except for a 1,000-meter-wide scar in the middle, as if struck by something long, long ago. Pass. The blow didn't appear to have done any damage to Rama's rotating outer wall, but it was this mark that created the tiny change in brightness spotted by Stanton.

The images from the other cameras revealed nothing new, but Sita's measurements of Rama's tiny gravitational field provided another important piece of information: about the mass of the cylinder. It was too light for an entity, and no one doubted now that Rama was hollow. The long-awaited and long-dreaded contact has finally arrived.Humanity will receive interstellar visitors for the first time.