Contact across the Solar System

"No Visible Means of Propulsion"

It was just another day for American astronomer Mark Schmidt, a balding, middle-aged hunter of near-Earth asteroids. Or so it seemed at first. He worked by taking lots of pictures of the sky with a telescope and then looking for anything that moved relative to the stars. His work got some support because of the possibility that the Earth could be hit by such an asteroid. Such a hit could be devastating, and a big-enough one would cause a mass extinction, possibly including humanity. But if an asteroid could be detected far enough in advance, it could be deflected or destroyed before it reaches the Earth.

But what he found that day was very startling. He was observing a new asteroid, but its orbit was very bizarre. It was hyperbolic, meaning that the asteroid was moving fast enough to escape from the Solar System. It was not marginally hyperbolic, but well-over-the-limit hyperbolic. He got his orbit-fitting software to use a lot of random initial guesses, but they all converged on that strongly hyperbolic orbit.

If it got closer to the Earth, then it may be easier to observe it and help work out what it is. So Mark had his software look for close encounters with the Earth, and he found one -- a *very* close encounter, almost enough to collide.

An asteroid on a hyperbolic course that was headed to the Earth? What could it possibly be? Mark thought about the numerous exoplanets that were being discovered. They were all big objects, but only big objects were visible over interstellar distances, and only big objects could produce any other observable evidence of their presence. Maybe also a lot of small objects together, but not any individual one. So could some asteroid have gotten ejected from some other planetary system? That was not impossible, thought Mark, but it seems very improbable that the only known one would be heading on a collision course with the Earth.

That left a hypothesis that he was very unwilling to discuss: that it was an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

So he informed his colleagues of his discovery, and he was careful to include his asteroid pictures. He also included his speculations about an ejected asteroid from another planetary system.

Some of his colleagues started observing it, and one of them, American astronomer Joe Patel, used a radio telescope to do radar observations. He could get distances and line-of-sight velocities with it, complementing the visual observations very nicely. Putting the pieces together, he found his radar observations to be consistent with the visual observations. Here was an asteroid racing toward the Earth at something like 130 km/s, much faster than the Solar-System escape velocity near the Earth, about 42 km/s.

His observations helped improve estimates of the asteroid's closest approach with the Earth, and using orbit-fitting software revealed that it would barely miss the Earth, by about 1000 km or so.

Mark and Joe preferred to call the object the hyperbolic asteroid, but many other people preferred to call it the Schmidt-Patel Object or the SPO.

Though the two astronomers were cautious and thus very unwilling to endorse the hypothesis of an extraterrestrial spacecraft, a lot of journalists were not. They composed screaming headlines about extraterrestrial visitors on their way to the Earth.

Then within about 20,000 kilometers, the SPO started slowing down. But it did so without making an observable exhaust plume, and with no observable heating or bright spots on it. By then, it was close enough for numerous amateur astronomers to observe it, and they took numerous pictures of it against the stars. When it became close enough to be seen without a telescope, large numbers of people were able to see it.

After it went into a 700-km low-Earth orbit, Mark held a press conference. He described his observations, Joe's observations, and those of his colleagues and of numerous amateur astronomers. He then got into the object's trajectory: hyperbolic, then getting into a low Earth orbit.

"Our best hypothesis, at the moment, is that it is an extraterrestrial spacecraft," he announced.

He then described observations of the object across the electromagnetic spectrum, and also radar observations.

"As far as we can tell, it has no visible means of propulsion."

He justified his initial skepticism by noting the numerous false alarms of the past. Mars's canals. The Mars Face. Mars's moons being hollow. UFO's. "But this looks like the real thing."

As he was holding his press conference, the SPO was changing its orbit from a low-latitude one to a polar one. After an orbit in that orientation, it changed its orbit to a noon-midnight one, as it might be called. It was overhead at roughly local noon or else at local midnight. All with no visible evidence of how it changed orbits.

In its orbit, it was close enough to be resolved with a small telescope, and its shape was very apparent: a cylinder. Nothing like many science-fiction spaceships like the numerous spaceships of Star Trek.

The arrival of the SPO became huge news the world over, and large numbers of people observed it when they could. When it was illuminated by the Sun, it was easily visible without a telescope, looking like a very bright star, almost as bright as Venus.

To many people, it was a welcome respite from the other big news of the day. The Saudi dissension was getting worse, and approaching outright civil war. The nation's armed forces were getting split up into different factions, and the factions were staking out territories. Oil traders panicked, shooting oil prices way up, and gasoline prices with them. Even nations that got little or none of their oil from Saudi Arabia were pinched, since the oil market is effectively one big worldwide pool of oil. Other oil suppliers scrambled to fill in, but it took time to get their production capabilities expanded, and who could tell if this was just a hiccup that would soon be brought under control?

Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates flew in large numbers of mercenaries from across the world's Koran Belt. The troops paraded in convoys in cities like Kuwait City, Manama, Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai, convoys of Moroccans, Algerians, Libyans, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Malaysians, Indonesians, and the like. There were rumors that some of the Saudi factions were also hiring mercenaries from some of these places.

Meanwhile, aboard the Aurora, Orthon was pleased at the attention that the ship was getting from Earthers, even if some of it seemed rather screwy.

An asteroid ejected from another planetary system? He asked his friends back on Venus about that, and Zuhl responded "I asked some astronomers about that, and here is what they said. That is not impossible, but we haven't observed a clear case of one. Earther astronomer Mark Schmidt is right about the possibility of one, and he is right that an ejected one would indeed have a hyperbolic orbit in our Solar System. But we haven't seen any, though we have seen several possible ejected planets in interstellar space. We say 'possible' because they might instead have formed away from any stars. We suspect that we haven't seen any ejected asteroids because it is *very* improbable that one will come close enough to the Sun for us to see it."

"As to his skepticism about the spaceship hypothesis, it seems like the Earther scientific community has become overly skeptical from having suffered such embarrassments as Mars's canals."

Orthon responded "It looks like we're fixing that. In fact, they are freaking out about what they observe about our propulsion systems. Or rather what they don't observe. They expect us to be using rockets or something like that."

On Venus, Kalna and Ilmuth also followed the news. To Kalna, it seemed that the ship's maneuvers had scared the Earthers with the ship's appearance of being an asteroid on a high-speed collision course with the Earth. But that's how a spacecraft approaches a planet, so it was hard to avoid. For her part, Ilmuth thought back to the researches of her and Kalna in Earther university libraries, and their failure to discover anything like SSC spacecraft-propulsion technologies there. Now the Earthers were seeing a SSC ship in action in full view, and they were scratching their heads like crazy about it.