Acid Sky (32 page)

Glideslope
– a radio-based navigation aid that establishes an accurate vertical course to a runway or landing pad.

Hydrosphere
– the combined mass of all the water (including water vapour in the atmosphere) on a planet.

Klystron
– a vacuum tube-based high power amplifier for high-frequency radio signals such as radar.

LO2
– common abbreviation for liquid oxygen.

Localiser
– a radio-based navigation aid that establishes an accurate horizontal course to a runway or landing pad threshold.

Mesosphere
– the upper regions of Venus’s atmosphere, where the temperature increases with altitude, eventually transitioning into the thermosphere and space.

Navigation Display
(ND) – information from external navigation aids and geographical databases are combined to create a display of the craft’s position and course.

Obliquity
(to orbit) – in astronomy, the tilt of a body’s equator relative to the body’s orbital plane.

Orbital inclination
– for a planet, the inclination of its orbital plane round the Sun relative to that of Earth’s. All the planets orbit within a few degrees of this plane.

Perihelion
– closest approach of an orbiting body to the Sun.

Phobos
– larger of Mars’s two moons, believed to be a captured asteroid.

Primary Flight Display
(PFD) – situated in front of each pilot, the PFD provides all the relevant flight information needed by the pilot for each phase of the mission, e.g. re-entry, atmospheric flight, and landing.

Propane
– gaseous hydrocarbon of the alkane family, chemical formula C
3
H
8
. Can be liquefied at
cryogenic
temperatures.

Sidereal orbit period
– the time for a body to make one revolution about the Sun relative to the fixed stars.

Sidereal rotation period
– the time for a body to make one rotation on its axis relative to the fixed stars. This is different to the
length of day
, especially for planets that rotate slowly (or backwards) compared to their orbital motion around the Sun.

Sidestick
– evolution of the more traditional control yoke, for controlling an aircraft in pitch and roll. A sidestick is controlled by small wrist and arm movements, and can be operated even under high-g conditions.

Solar irradiance
– in astronomy, incident solar power per unit area on a body.

Stall
– in aerodynamics, a sudden reduction of lift over a wing caused by the wing’s angle of attack increasing to a point where the stable airflow over the wing breaks down and becomes turbulent, drastically reducing lift.

Tropopause
– the transition region of Venus’s atmosphere between the
troposphere
and the
mesosphere
.

Troposphere
– the hot and dense lower regions of Venus’s atmosphere, where most of the weather and clouds are contained. The temperature in the troposphere decreases rapidly with altitude until the
tropopause
, when it reverses and starts to increase again in the
mesosphere
.

VHF
– Very High Frequency, typically applied to radio communication.

X band
– a region of the electromagnetic spectrum between about 7.0–12.5 GHz, used for voice and data radio communications between spacecraft and planetary bases and Earth.

Zulu
– Zulu Time, a standard aviation term for
UTC
.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING

Beatty, J. Kelly (ed.), Carolyn Petersen (ed.) and Andrew Chaikin (ed.)
The New Solar System.
4th edn. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Coonts, Stephen P.
Flight of the Intruder
. Simon and Schuster, 1986.

Greeley, Ronald, and Raymond Batson.
The Compact NASA Atlas of the Solar System.
Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Gunston, Bill.
The Development of Jet and Turbine Aero Engines.
4th edn. Patrick Stephens Ltd, 2006.

Jenkins, Dennis R.
Magnesium Overcast: The Story of the Convair B-36
. Specialty Press, 2002.

Jenkins, Dennis R. and Tony R. Landis.
Valkyrie: North American’s Mach 3 superbomber.
Specialty Press, 2004.

Krasnopolsky, V.A. and Parshev, V.A., ‘Chemical composition of the atmosphere of Venus’.
Nature
292 (1981): 610-613.

Landis, Geoffrey A., et al. ‘Atmospheric Flight on Venus’.
40th
AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit,
Reno, Nevada, 14–17 Jan. 2002.

Landis, Geoffrey A. ‘Colonization of Venus’.
STAIF Conference on Human Space Exploration
, Albuquerque NM, 2-6 Feb. 2003.

Landis, Geoffrey A. ‘Exploring Venus by Solar Airplane’.
STAIF Conference on Space Exploration Technology
, Albuquerque NM, 11-15 Feb. 2001.

Lewis, John S.
Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets
. Basic Books, 1997.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration. ‘Preliminary mission study of single-launch manned Venus flyby with extended Apollo hardware’.
NASA MSC Internal Note 67-FM-25
, 13 Feb. 1967.

Oates, Gordon C. (ed.)
Aircraft Propulsion Systems Technology and Design.
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1989.

Sellers, David.
The Transit of Venus.
Magavelda Press, 2001.

Sobel, Dava.
The Planets.
Fourth Estate, 2005.

Sutton, George P.
Rocket Propulsion Elements.
5th edn. John Wiley & Sons, 1986.

United States Department of the Navy.
CVN Flight/Hangar Deck NATOPS Manual.
NAVAIR 00-80T-120. Department of the Navy, 2010.

COMPARATIVE ASTRONOMICAL DATA

For explanations of terms, see Glossary

Ten years later …

IN THE DARKNESS BELOW MERCURY, THE DEAD LIE WAITING …

Mercury – closest planet to the Sun. In the permanent darkness of Chao Meng-fu crater lie vast fields of ice that that have never seen the Sun, and the ruins of Erebus Mine, abandoned and forgotten after a devastating explosion that claimed the lives of 257 people. After an eight-year legal battle, the relatives of the victims have finally succeeded in forcing the Space Accidents Board to reopen its investigation. Matt Crawford, a mine engineer who escaped the disaster, joins a team sent back to the mine to discover the true cause of the accident. The team is led by Clare Foster, a pilot in the U.S. Astronautics Corps, who has taken on the mission in the hope of rebuilding her career after a near-miss incident.

But powerful forces are determined that what lies hidden in the mine will never be uncovered, and have taken steps to ensure that the mission team will never return. Stranded on Mercury, the team are divided by internal conflict, and a growing realisation of what really happened in the mine. Soon Matt and Clare are thrown together in a desperate race for survival against an implacable enemy that will not rest until it has killed them all …