Prologue
My connection to the most important discoveries of all time began in a classroom at the community college where I teach College Writing, near Boston. Quite a few Vietnamese students have come through my Comp 101 course over the years. They all are English-language learners, and all are motivated, both in my class, and for their futures in the US. Quan Tran was no different in those respects. He excelled in my class, and seemed just as motivated as the others.
This story actually begins after Quan transferred to MIT to study aerospace. He had mentioned to me that he wanted to transfer to MIT to get an engineering degree. In my class he overcame all of his English-language difficulties, and I was sure that Quan had the intellectual horsepower for MIT. I could see Quan’s drive, and I directed him to see a colleague who facilitates transfers to private colleges and universities. After Quan finished my course, he told me of his plans for MIT, and I encouraged him stay in touch.
Quan did drop in the next semester. Not just once, but twice. He knew of my passing interest in the space program, said he is one to sustain relationships, and wanted me to know of his progress at MIT. His visits evolved, over time, into an unlikely friendship. We began to meet from time to time at a café in Central Square, Cambridge; I learned about Vietnamese customs and traditions; he invited me to his wedding; and thanks to our deepening friendship, I had a near front-row view of the events that shook the world, which I describe in the pages that follow.
PART 1
1. Control Room
After graduating from MIT with a degree in aeronautical engineering, Quan went on to CalTech, where he earned his Ph.D. in off-planet engineering, and joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena California, as a propulsion engineer. He worked directly on AVTER (Aerial Vehicle for Titan’s Exploration and Reconaissance), NASA’s latest mission to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.
He designed AVTER’s new generation of advanced electric propulsion and made a point to be at Mission Control to experience, with his colleagues, the mission’s success. AVTER, an experimental airplane, had nearly completed a seven-year journey to Titan. Titan’s dense atmosphere and weak gravity (one-seventh Earth’s) makes sustained, slow flight possible. The only known world, other than Earth with liquid lakes (in this case methane lakes), and abundant organic chemicals, Titan had long been a prime destination for planetary scientists who study the origins of life. AVTER, packed with instruments, and from an altitude of 500 feet, was to collect and transmit data and images back to Earth. The pictures from AVTER’s camera were to fill a wall-mounted video/computer projection screen at the front of the mission control room. Quan and his colleagues were expecting to launch new science when the picture that changed everything arrived.
Clocks embedded within computers both in the control room and the spacecraft recorded the mission’s elapsed time, and controlled the next scheduled events. Human controllers were always present, attending to progress, anomalies, successes. This particular time, engineers, designers, and researchers (but no media or press) all watched the screen on the wall, or waited at the monitors in their work stations, cracking knuckles or chewing gum. Some had been holding their breath with hands clasped beneath their chins, anxiously awaiting the first image from the deep space relay station in Spain; waiting for the proof that the mission had succeeded. The large screen at the front of the room began to fill with an image of a grey sky, a far-off horizon, a boulder to the right, a lake and a river. Scientists interested in atmosphere looked at the sky, while geologists looked at the rocks on the surface. But everyone saw something else, something that no one had ever considered possible: a spacecraft. Quan, standing to the side of the control room, saw several engineers’ mouths drop open, and he heard several gasps as people began to comprehend what they were seeing.
“What’s that thing?” someone asked in a clear, positive voice. Others asked the same question. Quan wondered, too.
“Is it Huygens?” someone asked. Huygens was the successful probe that the European Space Agency landed on Titan in 2005, a few years before NASA launched the AVTER mission.
“Not Huygens!” a voice shouted. This was the first raised voice; only five seconds had elapsed since the downlink had been completed.
“Who has been here before us?”
“What does it look like?”
“Whom should we call?” a voice asked. They were seeing an alien, unknown spaceship, right there on the surface of Titan, and it was easy to see, and in minutes, via social media, the rest world could see it too, except for the space agency’s social media policy: its activities were to be publicized only by the PR department. A strange hush took hold of the control room as engineers tried to capture information about the strange object, and concentrated on the download. Quan knew that it would be impossible to keep this secret.
Someone else, “Maybe it’s a hoax!’
“How can it be? Look!”
The screen showed what appeared to be a grounded, but not-wrecked, glider-like craft. It had a dark grey, cylindrical fuselage, and two wings that were detached and laying on Titan’s surface next to the fuselage. One end of the fuselage was tapered to a point. Attached to the other end was a propeller, a pusher propeller. Quan, a propulsion engineer took particular notice of that. There was no evidence of landing gear. Nor was there a canopy, as on a conventional airplane. It had no apparent antenna for radio communication. There was no evidence of physical damage, except for the detached wings.
That the craft was not natural was beyond any doubt. No identifying marks in the spectrum visible to the human eye could be seen. Perhaps there were marks visible in the infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths. It was a self-contained, obviously manufactured, assembled, and at one time, a maintained device. It was impossible to tell how long it had been in its location on Titan, or its origin, or reason for being on Titan. Except for the detached wings, no other objects related to the alien spacecraft lay within the camera’s lens’s view.
The craft may have been old, and if so, could have been exposed to the interplanetary elements for a long time. No one in the control room could gauge the effects of interplanetary “weather” and time on an unknown, non-natural object sitting on the surface of Titan. Quan and a few others began to suppose that it could have been abandoned.
Quan, as unprepared for this discovery as everyone else, after a few minutes understood the rarity of his position: he helped build the ship that captured an image that would almost immediately be intensely disruptive to all things normal, in every imaginable respect. He thought about his family in Vietnam, his passage from community college to MIT and now NASA. He wondered how this discovery on Titan would change his life.
My connection to the most important discoveries of all time began in a classroom at the community college where I teach College Writing, near Boston. Quite a few Vietnamese students have come through my Comp 101 course over the years. They all are English-language learners, and all are motivated, both in my class, and for their futures in the US. Quan Tran was no different in those respects. He excelled in my class, and seemed just as motivated as the others.
This story actually begins after Quan transferred to MIT to study aerospace. He had mentioned to me that he wanted to transfer to MIT to get an engineering degree. In my class he overcame all of his English-language difficulties, and I was sure that Quan had the intellectual horsepower for MIT. I could see Quan’s drive, and I directed him to see a colleague who facilitates transfers to private colleges and universities. After Quan finished my course, he told me of his plans for MIT, and I encouraged him stay in touch.
Quan did drop in the next semester. Not just once, but twice. He knew of my passing interest in the space program, said he is one to sustain relationships, and wanted me to know of his progress at MIT. His visits evolved, over time, into an unlikely friendship. We began to meet from time to time at a café in Central Square, Cambridge; I learned about Vietnamese customs and traditions; he invited me to his wedding; and thanks to our deepening friendship, I had a near front-row view of the events that shook the world, which I describe in the pages that follow.
PART 1
1. Control Room
After graduating from MIT with a degree in aeronautical engineering, Quan went on to CalTech, where he earned his Ph.D. in off-planet engineering, and joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena California, as a propulsion engineer. He worked directly on AVTER (Aerial Vehicle for Titan’s Exploration and Reconaissance), NASA’s latest mission to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.
He designed AVTER’s new generation of advanced electric propulsion and made a point to be at Mission Control to experience, with his colleagues, the mission’s success. AVTER, an experimental airplane, had nearly completed a seven-year journey to Titan. Titan’s dense atmosphere and weak gravity (one-seventh Earth’s) makes sustained, slow flight possible. The only known world, other than Earth with liquid lakes (in this case methane lakes), and abundant organic chemicals, Titan had long been a prime destination for planetary scientists who study the origins of life. AVTER, packed with instruments, and from an altitude of 500 feet, was to collect and transmit data and images back to Earth. The pictures from AVTER’s camera were to fill a wall-mounted video/computer projection screen at the front of the mission control room. Quan and his colleagues were expecting to launch new science when the picture that changed everything arrived.
Clocks embedded within computers both in the control room and the spacecraft recorded the mission’s elapsed time, and controlled the next scheduled events. Human controllers were always present, attending to progress, anomalies, successes. This particular time, engineers, designers, and researchers (but no media or press) all watched the screen on the wall, or waited at the monitors in their work stations, cracking knuckles or chewing gum. Some had been holding their breath with hands clasped beneath their chins, anxiously awaiting the first image from the deep space relay station in Spain; waiting for the proof that the mission had succeeded. The large screen at the front of the room began to fill with an image of a grey sky, a far-off horizon, a boulder to the right, a lake and a river. Scientists interested in atmosphere looked at the sky, while geologists looked at the rocks on the surface. But everyone saw something else, something that no one had ever considered possible: a spacecraft. Quan, standing to the side of the control room, saw several engineers’ mouths drop open, and he heard several gasps as people began to comprehend what they were seeing.
“What’s that thing?” someone asked in a clear, positive voice. Others asked the same question. Quan wondered, too.
“Is it Huygens?” someone asked. Huygens was the successful probe that the European Space Agency landed on Titan in 2005, a few years before NASA launched the AVTER mission.
“Not Huygens!” a voice shouted. This was the first raised voice; only five seconds had elapsed since the downlink had been completed.
“Who has been here before us?”
“What does it look like?”
“Whom should we call?” a voice asked. They were seeing an alien, unknown spaceship, right there on the surface of Titan, and it was easy to see, and in minutes, via social media, the rest world could see it too, except for the space agency’s social media policy: its activities were to be publicized only by the PR department. A strange hush took hold of the control room as engineers tried to capture information about the strange object, and concentrated on the download. Quan knew that it would be impossible to keep this secret.
Someone else, “Maybe it’s a hoax!’
“How can it be? Look!”
The screen showed what appeared to be a grounded, but not-wrecked, glider-like craft. It had a dark grey, cylindrical fuselage, and two wings that were detached and laying on Titan’s surface next to the fuselage. One end of the fuselage was tapered to a point. Attached to the other end was a propeller, a pusher propeller. Quan, a propulsion engineer took particular notice of that. There was no evidence of landing gear. Nor was there a canopy, as on a conventional airplane. It had no apparent antenna for radio communication. There was no evidence of physical damage, except for the detached wings.
That the craft was not natural was beyond any doubt. No identifying marks in the spectrum visible to the human eye could be seen. Perhaps there were marks visible in the infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths. It was a self-contained, obviously manufactured, assembled, and at one time, a maintained device. It was impossible to tell how long it had been in its location on Titan, or its origin, or reason for being on Titan. Except for the detached wings, no other objects related to the alien spacecraft lay within the camera’s lens’s view.
The craft may have been old, and if so, could have been exposed to the interplanetary elements for a long time. No one in the control room could gauge the effects of interplanetary “weather” and time on an unknown, non-natural object sitting on the surface of Titan. Quan and a few others began to suppose that it could have been abandoned.
Quan, as unprepared for this discovery as everyone else, after a few minutes understood the rarity of his position: he helped build the ship that captured an image that would almost immediately be intensely disruptive to all things normal, in every imaginable respect. He thought about his family in Vietnam, his passage from community college to MIT and now NASA. He wondered how this discovery on Titan would change his life.