Saturn Run

27.

Six days after parasol deployment and thirty-two days into their mission, the Nixon passed perihelion. This was the most uncertain part of the mission plan, next to visiting the alien whatsit.

There were a number of ways the ship could get into trouble. Parasol failure was only the most obvious and predictable one. That wouldn’t kill the crew.

“Well, probably not,” Fang-Castro told Clover. They were drinking tea in Fang-Castro’s apartment. “The ship could take the heat, at least for a couple of weeks. We don’t know if the heat pumps could shunt the thermal load from the living modules to the radiator system, but we think they could. Probably.”

“I wasn’t really thinking about the heat,” Clover said. “We got the heat handled. But I was talking to Alfie, and he said we’re near the solar maximum…”

“True…”

“…and so we get these flares and coronal ejections and whatnot, and there’s no really good way to model them. They can’t really see forward for more than a few days or a week. After that, it’s guesswork.”

“Guesswork and statistics. Statistics say we’d have to be really unlucky to get hit.”

“But if we did, it’d be all bad,” Clover said.

“Yes, it would be.” She smiled at him. “Since there’s not much we can do about it, except have fire drills, it’s best not to think about it.”

A major flare would unleash a burst of X-rays, and at the Nixon’s distance, the hard radiation would hit them in a few minutes—most of the crew wouldn’t get enough warning to reach the safety of aft Engineering, where they would be shielded by the huge water tanks that provided reaction mass for the VASIMR engines.

There were hidey-holes in each module of the ship, which, in a pinch, could accommodate the crew in a radiation-safe environment for the hour or so they might need protection—but it would be crowded and uncomfortable. Crowded and uncomfortable was better than dead.

Fang-Castro had insisted on drill after drill until every crew member showed they could make it to safety in less than ninety seconds, three times in a row. In the month leading up to perihelion, every crew member had come to hate the sound of the flare alarm.

After the X-rays, there’d be a proton storm. The flood of charged particles was immensely damaging, biologically, but it would also wreak havoc with electronics, inducing massive eddy currents in anything metallic.

The hidey-holes and the water tanks were enough to protect the crew but there was no way to electrically shield the entire ship. Shunts and circuit breakers would provide some protection, and the ship builders believed the craft would make it through without fatal damage. Nobody was quite sure, and there was no way to test for it.

The worst possibility was that they’d be hit by a coronal mass ejection. If that happened, they were toast. The massive plasma stream would overwhelm any imaginable safeguards on the ship’s critical systems.

There really wasn’t much to be done except prepare for what they reasonably could. Space weather could give them some advance warning, but the Nixon was not a maneuverable ship. The math was simple and irrefutable: the ship was barreling along at one hundred and fifteen kilometers per second deep in the sun’s gravitational well. At best, its engines could alter its velocity by two kilometers per second in a day’s time. Major course changes were out of the question. If the Nixon found itself on a collision course with a coronal mass ejection, then a collision was what was going to happen.

The anxiety was compounded by the boredom. There just wasn’t much to do on the ship: eat, work, sleep, exercise, watch vids beaming in from Earth. Ten days on, it looked like they were going to luck out, as far as solar storms were concerned. No news was the best news. Still, it was no news.

Boring.

Well, not all the time.