The Rock - 2

"So what do you remember ?" asked the little girl to The Traveller.

"Well, I remember the Rock".

"Ok, Good start , tell me from the beginning, I want to see how much do you remember?" Asked the little girl in her sing sing voice.

"Well, it started off from charting of near earth orbit (NEO) astroids, which were posing danger to earth. These are quiet common in fact, but none has hit earth in known recorded human history with devastating effect"

" But , I think even this one was not about to hit Earth, as such"

"True, it was not Earth, but actually the Moon which was about to be hit with the force of a few hundred atomic bombs, so all the space agencies sat together to access the damage and possible issues arising. Main problem was how to nudge the Rock from it's course, which posed a very interesting challenge to the team , as it was a good time to study such behaviours , without Earth in danger"

" So what was decided?"

"I volunteered, as head of the new constant thrust Drive initiative, I wanted to test drive the new 1g Drive and see it's power, along with close study of a NEO astroids", he smiled remembering the details, and the challange, which no body was willing to accept.

"Our team fitted the Heaviest Thrust Rocket with all the emergency rescue equipment, including the four latest Boston dynamic robots as my team mates, on board AI, lovingly called Mother and myself. We had all the necessary emergency rations for a year in space, two atomic cores for the power needs, a bunch of 3d molecular level replicators, all the raw material to create anything from them including artificial 3d printed limbs, if need be, and of course the 1g constant acceleration experimental drive"

"You were well prepared" sighed the little girl. The room was peaceful, now showing setting sun from it's windows. Both knew it to be an illusion, but still exuding calm.

" Well , the Asteroid was approaching at a break neck speed of 14.9 km per second, was the size of two football fields , and made of a metallic core, covered with ice and God knows what under that ice. "

"Our trajectory was carefully calculated , so that while we approached the Asteroid head on, we had to swing by and then try to catch it, then land on it, tether it, and turn on the full thrusters to steer it clear of the path of both earth and moon, disengage before it reached closer to sun, and melted all of its outer ice shell"

"We also had to take into effect the Yarkovsky effect , which can also cause an asteroid to veer off-course. The effect occurs when a space rock is heated in direct sunlight and cools down to release radiation from its surface"

"Only a mad man will embark on such a mission" The Little girl looked shocked.

"For a man, who has seen it all, all the wars, all the death, the glory , the rise of a united earth, and then signs of its imminent downfall, there was nothing left there to be proud of, I wanted to be off the planet, no matter the danger, also I had confidence in my team, and calculations of team at JPL, which had some experience in the matter (1)"

"So what went wrong, in your opinion" her tone was charming, but her question was too official sounding for him to ignore. Had they not be in deep space, he would have thought it part of his post mission brief.

"Our approach was perfect, we swing using all of our thrusters, however our landing was very, very bumpy. Where we expected soft ice, we encountered hard rock, bumped right into it, and badly crashed. Actually that landing knocked me over completely, and that is the last thing I actually remember. I was loosing consciousness, and actually thought that we all are dead, I wonder how we disengaged from the Rock , and how the heavy star ship rocket reached so far out into intersteller space"

"Why do you think we ever disengaged?" asked the little girl, her tone bitter.

"We are still stuck on top of the Rock, we survived the crash, you and me both, although my memory banks were demadged, leaving my default configuration of a 6 years old. You almost died, we lost one Boston Dynamics robot as well, however the other three served really well under me. We had to drill into the rocky core to survive the sun close fly by, which made the 1g Space Drive go into hyper mode and we shot out into deep space at constant 1g acceleration"

The Traveller was suddenly feeling really old. He was too old for such adventures, not that he was afraid of death, but surprises of such nature were really not his cup of tea.

He looked inward for a long time, finally sighed and said to himself, " Well, Allah is all Merciful. By Grace of God and His Beloved Prophet (Peace and Blessings Upon Him) , we shall come out of this predicament. It is He who has placed us in this situation, and with His help only, we will get out of it".

Little Girl was watching him closely with curiosity in her eyes. To her, this change of mood was surprising, given their circumstances and his earlier mood.

He smiled and finally said "Verily we belong to Allah, and verily to Him do we return."

Both looked at each other. Her Neural Network registering the phrases, his mood and his hope associated with a Being not visible but present all around. She smiled too, and looked out the window.

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References

(1) NASA launched its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission in 2022, and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory helped out. SpaceX launched the mission on a Falcon 9 rocket. It was the 1st Human Attempt to redirect an asteroid from it's path using a space craft.