11
Simferopol, Soviet Ukraine
In the time of primordial hell, an ancient star, burning hotter and hotter as it ran out of fuel, suddenly exploded in a blinding, cataclysmic supernova. This enormous burst of energy was unleashed as a shockwave, rippling out into the galaxy now called the Milky Way. The unfathomably powerful waves pulsed through primal clouds of hydrogen and helium, scattering and pushing them together like flotsam on an interstellar ocean.
For the next 100 million years, these clouds were pulled into ever-bigger clumps by their tiny forces of gravity—an agonizingly slow ballet of gentle drifting and spinning and gathering into denser regions. The near-endless molecules of hydrogen and helium, colliding with higher and higher force, began to heat up and glow in what was becoming a central protostar. And somewhere around 4.6 billion years ago, the pressures and temperatures got to a critical level; atoms were crushed in on themselves, binding energies were released, and thermonuclear fusion suddenly began.
Let there be light.
What that brand-new Sun illuminated was a huge, swirling flat disk of the rubble of space—gas and dust and rocky remnants of previous stellar explosions—all orbiting and collecting ever faster in the blackness. Far from the Sun, the low temperatures allowed volatile compounds to stay frozen, as ice. They collided endlessly and joined into ever-increasing lumps, gradually coalescing into the gas giant planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Closer to the Sun, though, the radiant heat turned the icy lumps into comets with tails, vaporizing the frozen gases. Countless rocks remained, crashing into each other, building larger and larger protoplanets. Some asteroids were a dense mix of rocks and metal, while others, from farther out, were lumpy balls of rubble held together by frozen water. One by one, over millions of years, they looped and collided, settling into the winners of this stellar game of billiards—the inner rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Mars and Earth.
But the massive gravitational pull of the two biggest planets, Jupiter and Saturn, caused resonance and disruption. They yanked rocks from the asteroid belt and the farthest regions of the outer Kuiper Belt, some the size of the inner planets, and slung them in unstable orbits towards the Sun. The resulting collisions were hugely powerful.
Earth was just a semi-molten ball of spinning rock, repeatedly bombarded by asteroids, ever growing in size. Over time the onslaught lessened, as the debris diminished. But the biggest was saved for last.
On a normal day in the young planet’s life, 4.5 billion years ago, it was struck like never before. A planet the size of Mars, traveling at 9,000 miles per hour, slammed into the Earth.
The rock and ice of this attacker were violently plunged deep into the Earth’s mantle, forever merging the two planets into one. It spun the Earth like a top, leaving it whipping around so fast that each day was just five hours long. The flying debris of the impact splashed high into near space, then fell back again as a rain of molten rock over the whole surface. But the inertia of the impactor was so high that great globs of itself, and of the Earth, were thrown all the way into orbit. A ring of debris, orbiting the planet, rapidly collected into one molten ball 2,000 miles across, glowing in the night sky.
The Earth now had a Moon.
And inside that Moon, an untold wealth of minerals rose, sank and churned as it cooled.
“What’s that?” Gabdul’s navigator tapped Lunokhod’s navigation camera screen with a fingertip. “There, to the left.”
They both leaned close to the frozen image on the small black-and-white screen. Gabdul had commanded Lunokhod to stop.
He moved his head back and forth, trying to decipher the grainy image. “It looks like a rock and its shadow.”
The navigator grunted. “I agree.” He glanced at the rest of the science team, who nodded. “Give me a minute to replot you a course, and let’s go have a look.”
For moving around the surface they relied on three low-res TV cameras, but Lunokhod also had four high-resolution cams and one ultraviolet photometer, a photodetector, an X-ray spectrometer and radiation detectors. It even had a penetrometer to slam into the ground to measure for hardness.
It might be fun to bash this rock!
The navigator flicked through his well-worn orbital images of the area, including some brand-new photographs taken by Apollo 15 and 17, gleaned from an international planetary exploration conference in Moscow a few weeks earlier; an American scientist had unwittingly given the images and a Defense Mapping Agency lunar topographic chart to a senior Lunokhod engineer. The new detail was superb, and added to the navigator’s confidence in telling Gabdul where to steer. He quickly laid out the route to get to a good science-gathering position near the rock, and then turned it into a sequence of operator commands.