Four
Zota ushered the Star Challengers from his office to the private briefing room where they got instructions for their missions. The ceiling sparkled with artificial stars.
Considering the threat they had learned about at the end of their mission to the space station, JJ was not surprised when Commander Zota announced he would send the team forward on a mission to the asteroids. According to the astronomy studies King had done for Drs. Wu and d’Almeida, three of those cosmic rocks had been knocked out of their orbits and sent hurtling toward Earth.
“In the future you’re going to this time,” Zota said, “the International Collaborative Space Agency will have run detailed calculations to map out their mission. I’m very curious to see how they plan to solve this crisis—and I’m sure you will help them to succeed. Let me give you some background to prepare you.”
He seemed more subdued and grimmer than ever since recounting the horrors of the alien invasion and his own family’s death. Looking at the scar on his face, JJ could only guess at the terrible things the Kylarn had done to him—things even Zota wasn’t willing to talk about.
“Before that, however, we need to continue your skill training,” Zota said.
He spent an hour drilling the friends on simple Kylarn words and symbols before announcing that he had one more exercise for them. Though she knew that taking time to practice wouldn’t actually delay the mission—Zota’s time machine would send them to the correct time and place regardless of when they left here—JJ was impatient to get into the future.
“Because space is such a hazardous environment, I want you to be familiar with remote controls and robotic assistance in order to complete operations.”
“We used spacesuits on the Moon, and we trained for extravehicular activities at the space station. We can learn hands-on when we get there,” JJ suggested.
“That isn’t always the best solution,” Zota said. “Not only are the risks greater to a person in a spacesuit outside the protection of a habitat, it often takes significant time and effort to put on a suit and exit an airlock. Robotic arms have been used for many work activities in space, ever since the ‘Canadarm,’ or the Shuttle Remote Manipulator System, flew as part of the second space-shuttle flight.”
“You mean we get to play with the waldos?” Tony asked, referring to the nickname for the remote-control grasping arms. “Major Rodgers trained me to use a robotic arm on the ISSC to launch the Eye in the Sky satellite. I’m not too bad at stuff like that, if I do say so myself.” JJ hadn’t gotten to use the waldos on their school field trip to the Challenger Center and looked forward to it now. It would be fun to play with the joystick controls, moving the metal gadget on its three axes.
The commander frowned at Tony. “Do you not wish to improve? To practice?”
Tony flushed. “No, I didn’t mean that.”
“Come on, you can be my partner,” JJ offered, smiling. “Since you’re so good at it, show me how it’s done.”
Zota cleared his throat. Tony, JJ, and the other Star Challengers returned their attention to him.
On the main screen on the front wall, the commander projected a diagram of the solar system. “I’m sure you’re all very familiar with the planets orbiting our Sun?”
Tony spoke up. “My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Noodles. That’s the mnemonic I use to remember the names of the planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.”
“Poor Pluto,” Dyl said, “it used to be considered a planet, but it got demoted. Now it’s called a ‘dwarf planet’—probably just a huge chunk of rock and ice in a long-term orbit.”
Zota pointed to a large gap that separated the inner four rocky planets from the outer four gas giants. “What we’re most interested in at the moment are the asteroids, right here between Mars and Jupiter.” He touched a keyboard on the controlling computer, and all the planets in the solar system diagram began circling the Sun. The inner ones moved faster, while the outer planets crawled along. The asteroids, a flurry of tiny pinpoints, looked like a swarm of fireflies.
“Unlike the major planets, asteroids cannot be seen with the naked eye. It wasn’t until 1801 that the first asteroid was discovered by the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi. At first he thought it was a new comet, but it moved more like a planet. He named it Ceres, after the Roman goddess of agriculture.” Zota indicated the blur of dots. “Amateurs, astronomers, and space telescopes have identified several hundred thousand now, many of them in stable orbits. Some asteroids, however, are erratic and the majority aren’t well cataloged.” The commander shook his head. “In your time, people don’t consider it a very high priority.”
“I do,” King said. “That’s why I spent so much time scanning star charts with Dr. Wu on the Moon, and Dr. d’Almeida aboard the space station, sir. We detected three that had moved out of their known orbits. Asteroids are hard to find because they’re so small.”
“Yes,” Zota said. “The large ones are usually fifty to a hundred miles in diameter, and perhaps thirty of them are larger than that. But the vast majority are only a mile or two across—barely a dust speck in the solar system. If we could gather all known asteroids together into a single lump, the total mass would still be smaller than the Earth’s Moon.”
“If they’re so small, why are we worried about them?” Dyl had taken out his perennial note cards and was busily scribbling down the data Commander Zota recited.
“Pfft! ‘Small’ is a relative term, Junior,” Song-Ye said. “I certainly wouldn’t want a fifty-mile-wide boulder hitting me on the head.”
Tony gave a nervous laugh. “I wouldn’t even want a one-mile boulder hitting my head.”
“You saw the craters made by falling meteorites on the Moon,” Zota said. “And those were tiny pebbles compared to these. The Earth is moving in its orbit, the asteroids are moving; all the planets are constantly circling the Sun. Over the billions of years since the solar system formed, occasional accidents have happened, orbits cross. We know some asteroids come very close to Earth, but even when an asteroid crosses our planets orbit, we don’t have to worry about a collision unless the planet and asteroid are in exactly the same place at exactly the same time.”
“Right,” JJ said. “Just because two streets intersect, that doesn’t mean two random cars on those streets are going to smash into each other.”
King pondered the diagram. “It’s like a cosmic chess game. Those altered asteroid orbits aren’t an accident or coincidence. The Kylarn specifically aimed the asteroids.”
“And if no one was looking, it would be very easy for one of those rocks to slip through unnoticed,” JJ said. “We wouldn’t have any idea until it actually hit us.”
“Didn’t an asteroid impact cause the extinction of the dinosaurs?” Song-Ye asked.
“Yes, scientists believe that sixty-five million years ago an asteroid struck our planet, estimated to be only about ten kilometers, or six miles, across. A relatively small asteroid, and yet that one strike wiped out not only the dinosaurs, but three-quarters of all the species that were alive then. That should tell you how much energy is released even by a relatively small asteroid that strikes the Earth.”
King gave a low whistle. “When we were on the Moon, Dr. Wu joked that the dinosaurs didn’t have a space program. They had no way of knowing what was about to happen to them.”
“And the Kylarn want to do that to us! We’ll barely have a space program when they arrive,” Dyl said.
JJ felt both dismayed and determined. She thought again about the mysterious, irritating man in the grocery store, who had called the space program a silly waste of time. She told them all about her debate with the man.
“There are many people like that—in your time and in mine,” Zota said. “Sometimes it’s hard to look at the big picture, to set your sights on the future and invest money for long-range goals, rather than something with an immediate payoff. But now that you’ve been to the future, you’ve seen for yourself how important it is to prepare now. That will be just one of the challenges you’ll have to face throughout your lives. It may be gradual, but attitudes need to change.”
“Someone’s got to do it.” JJ stood up and looked around. “It might as well be the Star Challengers. We’re ready to go.”
***