The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera by David Afsharirad

Author:David Afsharirad [Afsharirad, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781476780580
Amazon: 1476780587
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2015-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

The purpose of the Prometheus mission was to secure the Helios Station on the surface of Icarus, the hottest hunk of rock in the Solar System. Orbiting Sol inside the orbit of Mercury, Icarus was a two-mile-diameter nickel-iron asteroid. Even smaller than Deimos, the smallest Martian moon at seven-by-nine miles, there was nevertheless enough of it for a ship to approach in the shadow and touch down on it. The ship, however, would be as light as a feather. With gravity 1/10,000th that of Earth, a man, even in a bulky spacesuit, would not be able to walk across the surface of Icarus. He’d have to traverse the 15 square miles of jagged and sun-blackened surface by his hands, like a buoyant scuba diver pulling himself along the bottom of a Caribbean lagoon.

Once planted, the Helios Station would be a permanent, cheap, and fully automated solar observatory. It would monitor the various layers of the Sun’s roiling solar gases, the photosphere, chromosphere, and corona, with their varying temperatures, directions, and visual characteristics. Based on Icarus, its orbit would never decay, as had so many other robotic solar observer spacecraft, plunging them into the Sun.

In addition, the four-hour rotation of Icarus meant there would also be a period of night during which useful observations could be made of the chromosphere and corona, the layers of hot gases just above the Sun’s photosphere, or visual surface. While those layers actually shine by themselves, they are overwhelmed by the intensity of the direct surface glare. Blotting out that glare would bring the upper two layers into prominent view. Nighttime conditions would also make it possible for the Helios Station to observe the oval, gray, hazy glow of the inner Zodiacal light caused by sunlight reflection off dust particles along the plane of the Solar System, also erased in the full glare of the Sun.

And, with a wildly elliptical orbit, Icarus at perihelion—its closest approach to the Sun—dwarfed any hell Mercury could offer. On Mercury, the Sun was only twice the size as seen from Earth. On Icarus it filled the sky. With a brightside surface temperature of 797 degrees Fahrenheit, Mercury was hot enough—but at high noon on Icarus a week from perihelion, the temperature hit 1,000 degrees F. And Prometheus was going to rendezvous with Icarus at perihelion.

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