Second Star by Dana Stabenow

Author:Dana Stabenow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Space flight --Fiction., Space colonies --Fiction., Svensdotter, Star (Fictitious character) --Fiction., Sci-Fi & Fantasy
ISBN: 9781936666256
Publisher: Gere Donovan Creative
Published: 2011-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

—Niccolo Machiavelli

WHY DID THE Mayflower cross the Atlantic?

To get to the other side.

We’re always going somewhere, up from Africa into Eurasia, across the Alaskan land bridge into North America, from Tahiti to Hawaii, from Plymouth to Plymouth Rock, from Terra to Ellfive. Simon’s genetic imperative in action.

Now we’re heading for the Asteroid Belt.

The proper term for the individual objects orbiting between Mars and Jupiter is “minor planet.” Asteroid means “starlike,” which asteroids are anything but. Some frustrated astronomers went so far as to refer to the small, rocky bodies gyrating around Sol between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter as “the vermin of the sky.” Their disgust and frustration rose from the fact that to accurately predict asteroidal orbits it is necessary to calculate the gravitational attraction of each of the major planets on each asteroid, and then the perturbing effects each asteroid has on the other.

This massive compilation of data proved so exhausting that there were serious proposals to abandon study of the minor planets altogether. No such luck. By now we know that Mars’s gravitational pull determines the inner edge of the Belt, more or less, and Jupiter’s pull defines the outside edge, more or less. The Belt is somewhat toroidal, like the Doughnuts, and is as wide as the distance from Sol to Terra. More or less.

Here’s the deal: The only rule of size, shape, orbit, inclination, or composition of individual asteroids is that there isn’t one. Tiny Hidalgo has an orbital period of nearly fourteen years and has howdied with Saturn. In 1937 Hermes came within 760,000 kilometers of Terra. Icarus has an orbital period of thirteen months, but there are other rocks that take even longer than Jupiter to make a 360 around Sol. The bulk of the asteroid belt is only somewhat inclined to the plane of the ecliptic in which the planets revolve, but Feodosia has an orbital inclination of over fifty-three degrees.

See what I mean? Albedo readings indicate compositions varying from carbonaceous chondrites to nickel-iron metal, and while Ceres with less than a third the diameter of Luna is dense enough to provide a surface gravity strong enough to keep your food and your feet down, provided your food and feet start out that way, the combined mass of all asteroids including Ceres has been calculated at not more than ten percent of Luna’s, which has less than a quarter the diameter of Terra.

There are almost as many theories about the formation of the minor planets as there are minor planets. The original theory was that a planet broke up, with four variations on the major theme: 1) that the breakup was caused by an explosion, origin unknown; 2) that a too-rapid rotation caused a deterioration and eventual disintegration; 3) that a tidal disruption did same; 4) that a collision between two planets did same.

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