Chapter 40

Harold had been waiting for this day for six months. One hundred seventy five days. The inferior conjuncture distance was only 42 million kilometers, which at 10,000 kilometers per hour, would take a brief 175 days of cruising - no rest stops or potty breaks. The vehicle had actually gone at 50,000 kilometers per hour and covered 210 million kilometers. This trajectory allowed the aero-braking which allowed the vehicle to go into Venusian orbit. If only Harold could be so accurate. He drove the old station wagon into the Houston parking lot and parked next to a Mercedes. He opened his door with the usual aplomb and paint loss. In just sixty minutes the vehicle would enter the Venusian atmosphere. The satelite stage had separated and used its rocket to slow to enter orbit. The re-entry vehicle was designed to use aero-braking to slow from the 50,000 kilometers per hour interplanetary speed to a speed at which the planes could deploy. It achieved this maneuver by entering the atmosphere at a grazing angle. The friction would slow the vehicle sufficiently. It was important that the angle was just right. If it was too steep the vehicle would re-enter the atmosphere to quickly and the heat sheild would be cooked off. The vehicle would then overheat and burn up. If the angle was too minimal the vehicle would not slow enough and bounce off to orbit the sun. Once the speed was 300 kilometers per hour a main chute would deploy and slow the vehicle to plane deployment speeds. The reentry vehicle would open, and drop the payload to 55 kilometers altitude. At 55 kilometers the planes would be released. .

Each of the ten planes separated from the dispenser bus in turn. They were in free fall at this point. Idividual chutes slowed their speed as they unfolded their wings. Ten giant plastic origami moths unfolding from their cocoons. The solar panels on the giant wings provided power and the computer systems turned on the auto-pilots. The chutes were dropped and the planes leveled out at 50 kilometers altitude. The electric motors began to swing the props and the planes began the slow climb back to 55 kilometers. The temperature was a balmy 20oC. The incubators would take a day to get up to production speed. They had been in a deep frost.

The transmitters on the planes initiated their first transmissions to the now orbiting relay satellite. Each one checked in and gave their location, altitude, system status, and local conditions. The mass spectrometers were the first system initiated. Each plane transmitted baseline data to the relay satellite which transmitted it to earth.

Houston was ecstatic when the first data came in. Ten vehicles, ten planes, all working perfectly. Ten little weather stations at least 42 million kilometers from home. A phone call came from the president.

The Venusian dawn is slow in coming. With a 5832 hour day one can savor the dawn. The surface was a reddish brown color with streaks of darker rock. There were rocks of all sizes. Small, medium, large, Jumbo, Super Jumbo. There was a simple beauty in the dry, rocky, dusty surface. Shadows stretched across the surface but there was no one to notice. Simply a dry, lifeless, hot terrain. Really, really, really hot. How hot? It was so hot. Never mind. Trust me 460oC is hot. No weatherman to comment but that would come soon enough. The sky was cloudy. Not cloudy like SF or Seattle. These were clouds that really, really understood the concept of overcast. Sulfur dioxide and condensing carbon dioxide in fluffy corrosive layers. Well, soon the sky would be different. There was no one to notice this eventful day. The crop dusters from earth had finally begun.

Before the start of the BioAtmospherics Project the surface of Venus had only been seen by a few Russian space craft. The craft had lasted a few short hours and then failed. The intense heat and corrosive atmosphere destroyed delicate space craft in a matter of hours. They could not maintain their cooling and the electronics stopped working. The few images sent back through the heavy cloud layers showed a barren rocky surface. There were hills, valleys, gullies, ravines, mountains. Certainly no vegetation, no flora or no fauna, just merely a sauna filled with carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. The rocks at the surface were dry, dusty, and slightly reddish from the iron in the soil. There had been extensive volcanic activity with many tall volcanoes. Since there was no vegetation, all of the rivulets of lava were still visible, unlike those on earth that are quickly covered over by organic matter. Some of the taller peaks were eroded by wind and dust storms. There were a few of those teetering rock sculptures that made Wiley Coyote and the Valley of the Monuments so famous but much of the topography was simply dry barren dusty soil. When the first bacteria fell to the ground they simply stuck and added a fine organic dust to the surface. At 700oK they would normally ignite, but in a 99 percent carbon dioxide atmosphere they simply congealed into an organic goo. There was no one there to see the first organism fall. No one to mourn its untimely demise in that furnace we call the surface of Venus. No one to complain of the mess. The algae, lichens, and bacteria were cooked into an oily material that slowly seeped into the surface. At the surface it was quite thin but as it seeped in to deeper rock, the temperatures were a bit lower and it soon became more viscous.

The dry barren rocks of the surface began to take on a sheen. There was a smell to it. Something of a cross between bread mold and a diaper pail. No one was there to smell it, but it was something special. As the surface absorbed more oil from the heat decomposed organic rain, the normal dust that was kicked up by the winds began to die down. The surface had more cohesion and the dust was not as loose. Soon the surface was oily enough that very little dust was available to blow in the winds. The loss of dust in the atmosphere slowed the cooling process because more radiant energy reached the surface. But there were fewer particles for the organisms to condense on. This led to a prolonged longevity in the atmosphere, increasing their numbers and therefore the rate of the reaction. What was lost in increased absorption, was more than made up for by increased survival time.

The rocks at the surface were slowly cooling. The oily layer got thicker and thicker. Soon there were puddles of algae, lichen, and bacterial oil between the rocks then little ponds that still had to soak in. As more and more carbon dioxide was trapped in organic material at the surface the atmospheric content dropped. The algae and lichen were trapping gaseous carbon dioxide into organic derived oils. The oil soaked in and slowly, ever so slowly reduced the atmospheric carbon dioxide partial pressure. As the carbon dioxide partial pressure of the atmosphere decreased the infrared absorption decreased and the temperature dropped even more. With each degree of temperature drop they could live at lower and lower altitudes. They would continue to fix carbon dioxide only limited by the availability of water as a hydrogen source. The organisms that fell still melted at the surface long after the atmospheric temperature decreased to the point that they could live near the surface. The rocks held enough heat to melt them and cause the organic goo to soak in. The dry sandy dirt soon began to look like sand mixed with asphalt or oil. A bit like a Saudi golf course where they spray oil on sand to make part of the course not a sand trap.

The view from the surface was magnificent. As the dust died down the full scope of the complexity of the surface could be appreciated from the orbiting observatory. There were large volcanoes with multicolored discharge plateaus. Wide areas of very complex geology, none of it smoothed by water based erosion that we are so used to on this planet. There were high mountain ranges, much more rugged and wild than on earth. On earth much of the rugged geology has been sanded down by the passage of time. Fresh, raw geology is ruined by time. The Apalachian Mountains once young and fresh are now a shadow of their former selves. The water and wind have smoothed the broken edges. Dirt covers the surface and trees and grass hide all of the rugged areas. Someone should start a movement to preserve the mountains. Not from people, from erosion. Think of the massive destruction geologic time has allowed. If you send in your check before midnight tonight we can lobby congress to pass a law preventing the erosion of our precious mountains by the passage of geologic time. Mail in your check before it is too late. On a planet without water, dirt, or trees all of the complexity of the surface is still visible. There is a certain beauty in a surface that does not have top soil, no trees, no grass, just rocks, and rocks, and more broken rocks. On the moon there are lots of impact craters because of the lack of an atmosphere and the absence of erosion. On Venus there is an atmosphere that burns up most meteors, and wind that erodes the craters. There are still a few. These craters soon became filled with the organic goo. The surface of these pools began to shimmer in the sunlight. There were the traces of orange, red, and purples from the trace minerals in the cellular rain. As time passed minerals from the surface leached into the pools and turned them deeper shades of green and red. In the hot Venusian Dawn the reflection of the mountains in the green-red crater pools of organic goo was a special sight. There weren't any tourists there to see it. No little hot dog stands selling souvenir cups with the crater pool view on them. We can only wait for the day.

Chapter 41

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