Many years ago I read a short science fiction story by Isaac Asimov called The Martian Way, which he published in 1952. In this, planet Earth maintained control over ambitious colonies elsewhere in the solar system by means of controlling the water supply. At the start of the story everyone assumed that Earth’s vast oceans were the only source of water available. Whoever controlled the water was in charge. The plot is resolved by the retrieval of a piece of Saturn’s rings the size of a small mountain, made largely of ice. With some modest engineering work this was propelled back to Mars where it was needed. The possibility of autocratic rule based on control of the necessities of life was gone.

It was a good story, and highlights our changing comprehension of the place of water in the universe at large. Go back only a century or two, and there was a widespread assumption that whatever other worlds might exist would be pretty much like Earth. Features on the Moon were called seas, bays, lakes and marshes, presuming that they held open water. Early science fiction writers like Jules Verne (From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon) and HG Wells (The War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon) took for granted that interplanetary travel would be relatively easy, and that once you landed, you would need no special protection except against low temperatures comparable to the Arctic. When in 1877 Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli named features on Mars canali (the Italian word for ‘channels’), nobody hesitated to use the English word canal.

Then came the early days of space travel, along with a dramatic increase in the power and accuracy of telescopes. The lunar seas turned out to be open plains with no running water at all. The surface features on Mars ceased to be seen as artificial water channels, and were reinterpreted as the result of natural weathering on dry rock. The language we used for the planets changed. In 1961, Arthur C Clarke wrote A Fall of Moondust, where the plot hinged on the total absence of water. In 1969, Buzz Aldrin referred to the “Magnificent Desolation” that he saw on stepping out of the Apollo 11 lunar module. Imagery from the Apollo missions – and the personal accounts of astronauts – established the idea in the popular consciousness that the vivid blue of Earth’s oceans was something unique and precious in a starkly barren universe. The image was reinforced by the “Blue Dot” picture taken from the Voyager I probe.

But after that, there was another wave of observations and information. Perhaps water was not so rare after all. The first target was the Moon, and a careful study of places which are permanently shadowed regions. It turned out that ice will tend to aggregate anywhere which is in shadow most of the time. Buzz Aldrin, turning to fiction in Encounter with Tiber, positioned an early lunar settlement at the Moon’s south pole, specifically because of this new-found source of water. The search for ice spread wider, and now it seems that pretty much everywhere we look we find it.

The asteroids have significant amounts scattered here and there, with some impressive finds by NASA’s Dawn probe. Mars itself shows every sign that open stretches of water once shaped the terrain, though accessing it nowadays might be tricky. As I was writing this, NASA reported the discovery of an underground body of ice just under the Martian surface. It seems that Asimov’s water-seeking Martian settlers would not have needed to trek out to Saturn after all. If they did go there anyway, they would find no mile-high ice mountains since the rings are largely made of tiny granules. However, several moons of both Jupiter and Saturn apparently have ice as their surface crust, and liquid water below.

So wherever we look in the solar system we find water, usually in the form of ice. Tomorrow’s space travellers and colonists will not have to worry about having access to water, though they will have to construct specialised equipment to access it. In Far from the Spaceports and Timing, my own fictional inhabitants of the Scilly Isles, somewhere out in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, will have to import many of life’s necessities, but not water – they will be able to find their own local supply.

Asimov wrote The Martian Way just as our scientific understanding was changing – indeed as with some other things he was ahead of his time. Although some of the details of his account would need updating, the basic theme remains sound. If and when we spread around the solar system, finding water is not going to be a problem.

Today’s blog collates various recent pieces of news about the asteroid belt and outer planets.

First, Ceres. The Dawn spacecraft has recently fired up its main ion drive again, in order to raise its orbit up to nearly 1500km. For the last few months it has been in orbit at 385km, closer to Ceres than the ISS is to us here on  Earth. This low orbit has been great for studying surface features, but there is plenty of science to be done from higher up, not least because the final orientation of the orbit in relation to Ceres and the sun will be quite different than on initial approach – this time it will go over the poles. The polar orbit is ideal for searching for additional water supplies to complement the ice already found (both on the surface and also below it). So the change was made while there is still enough fuel for the ion drive to make this transfer. A difficult choice had to be made between this, or the possibliity of moving on to a third asteroid – since Dawn has already over-delivered on the original objectives, either would have been a remarkable achievement.

One of the last news releases before the orbit shift was about ice volcanoes, and in particular the volcano Ahuna Mons. It is an unusual shape, with other strange features, and the most plausible explanation at the moment is that it is basically a water volcano, spitting out water from a base of salty mud. Careful measurements of the orbital path have shown that the interior also contains a lot of water ice, probably arranged in a concentric shell around a rocky core. The asteroid – properly speaking a dwarf planet – is rather less dense than Earth or our Moon, but has an interesting internal structure which, perhaps, can one day be investigated more closely. At the same time, some traces of a very thin atmosphere were found – vastly too little to survive on, but enough to shape some surface conditions and interfere with the flow of the solar wind.

Other studies from low orbit include the bright patches first noticed on the original approach. The brightest of all of these are in Occator Crater, and closer inspection has shown a large group of irregular refletive areas. The most prevalent theory is that they are patches of salt, exposed on the surface by geological activity from inide the planet as well as meteor impact from outside.

What we don’t know, of course, is how far these features are typical of asteroids more generally. Would, for example, prospective visitors to my fictional Scilly Isle asteroids find similar phenomena? At this stage, we don’t know. Dawn has visited just two asteroids – Ceres and Vesta. They were chosen in part because they are different from each other in various ways, not least the amount of water ice available (Vesta is much drier). It seems unlikely that these two snapshots have exhausted all the variety that there is to see.

Insofar as I have thought about the origins of the setting for these stories (and most of my thinking has been on much more immediate background) it seems likely that the hypothetical Scilly Isle asteroids would have common ancestry. After all, they’re only a matter of a few tens of thousands of km apart, and it would be a wild coincidence if they had all come from different places. In passing, this makes for a curious parallel with the real islands off the Cornish coast, since many of the islands we enjoy as separate places today were aggregated into a single island within fairly recent history. Bryher and Tresco were united as recently as the late 16th century, and in the Bronze Age only St Agnes was separate of the inhabited islands.

The presence of water ice in most of the solar system has become apparent over the last few years, and I have assumed that water supply would not be a problem for settlers. So far as Ceres goes, that’s certainly true. Our understanding of the particular details of how the ice is distributed will no doubt continue to evolve.

Much the same applies to mineral deposits of all kinds. Fictional asteroidal Scilly is full of failed attempts to mine substances. Today’s science community is rather divided as to whether asteroid mining will ever be financially viable. There is little doubt that all kinds of extractable material is present there, but serious questions remain as to whether the concentration or total volume is sufficient to meet the costs. In the books, Mitnash and his friends can make a decent return out of extracting rare earth elements from distributed areas of space with a higher proportion of dust and small rubble, variously called shoals and reefs in keeping with the oceanic turns of phrase throughout. We don’t yet know if this is feasible. As with so much else, we will have to wait for further exploration. Dawn has shown that a great deal can be done with automated probes, and it would be nice to imagine a long-term plan to map much larger sections of the asteroid belt.

It’s appropriate to finish for today with a quick mention of Juno, orbiting Jupiter and starting to return impressive levels of information. Here’s a picture of Jupiter’s north pole, a sight impossible to see from Earth.

I was going to do another post in the series on British prehistoric monuments this week, but that’s not ready yet.

So instead I thought I’d post up the descriptive blurb for the forthcoming Timing. There’ll be more about this over the next month or two as release date approaches.

Timing is set approximately a year after Far from the Spaceports. Mitnash and Slate have stopped off at the Scilly Isles on their way back towards Earth from a rather dull short-term assignment on Callisto, one of the moons of Jupiter. While they are there they hear some news which changes their plans radically.

Timing takes our spacefaring duo from the Scilly Isles down to Mars and its larger moon Phobos, and then back again as they pursue a new arrival on the fraud scene.

Without more delay, here’s the blurb:

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When quick wits and loyalty are put to the test

Mitnash and his AI companion Slate, coders and investigators of interplanetary fraud, are at work again in Timing, the sequel to Far from the Spaceports.

This time their travels take them from Jupiter to Mars, chasing a small-scale scam which seems a waste of their time. Then the case escalates dramatically into threats and extortion. Robin’s Rebels, a new player in the game, is determined to bring down the financial world, and Slate’s fellow AIs are the targets. Will Slate be the next victim?

The clues lead them back to the asteroid belt, and to their friends on the Scilly Isles. The next attack will be here, and Mitnash and Slate must put themselves in the line of fire. To solve the case, they need to team up with an old adversary – the only person this far from Earth who has the necessary skills to help them. But can they trust somebody who keeps their own agenda so well hidden?
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The cover is currently in preparation, and I’ll be sharing that before too long.

I thought it was about time for another space-themed blog today, so here are some interesting recent finds.

First, here is a high-resolution NASA picture of Haulani Crater on Ceres, taken from an orbital altitude of under 400 km.  The crater is about 21 miles in diameter, so would comfortably fit inside the M25 motorway around London. The level of detail is quite extraordinary, showing not only surface features such as landslides, but also allowing some inferences about the relative age of the different portions.

The scattering of bright spots on the surface of the asteroid has excited a great deal of conversation since they were first identified as Dawn drew closer on its long journey. Even with the close-up views, uncertainty remains, and probably will do until such point as something can actually land there. Meanwhile, the best guess is that they reveal traces of chemical deposits, probably some kind of salt. When you read of the asteroidal settlements called the Scilly Isles in Far from the Spaceports, imagine scenes like this out on the surface…

Atmosphere! When you read old science books, or old science fiction, most moons and similar small objects were believed to be completely airless bodies. Atmospheres were thought to be the province of “real” planets. But the more we have been able to get a close view, the more we realise that atmospheres are the rule rather than the exception. This image shows the view of Pluto captured by the New Horizons probe as it receded further away from the sun – the atmospheric haze extends out to about 80 km, considerably further than anybody had expected.

These atmospheres are generated by a whole mix of local conditions. These include the effects of the distant sun’s warmth driving chemical reactions, nearby bodies flexing the surface slightly, and so squeezing gas out of the rocks, as well as internal chemical or seismological actions. Now, it’s as well to remember the vast majority of the gases found are not only toxic, but also far too thin to be of much use… nevertheless finding them at all has been a surprise.

Finally, Mars. A good chunk of my forthcoming book (which currently has working title Timing) is set on Mars and one of its moons, so naturally I have been following discoveries there with interest. Now, our present selection of gadgets on Mars, while extremely clever and carrying out their missions in exemplary manner, come a long way short of what I have in my fictional imagination. Mars in the new novel has a wide variety of different communities, from a financial training college out near the giant mountain Olympus Mons, through to an anarchic and hedonistic settlement at Elysium Planitia. We are some way from achieving those yet, but there’s plenty of time…

That’s it for today. There seems to be plenty to discover out in the solar system. Some of the findings reinforce what was previously believed, but others open up whole new and unexpected areas. Happy reading – both fact and fiction.