Owen’s Asteroid
“So, our sun is called Sol, Mrs. Grimsley said. And all this area around it is the solar system. Can anyone tell me how many planets there are in the solar system?”
Edith’s hand shot up. “Ten,” she said, without waiting to be called upon.
“Edith, please wait to be called on,” Mrs. Grimsley said.
“Nine,” Harold said.
“Harold, please wait to be called on,” Mrs Grimsley said.
“Eight,” Rachel said. “There used to be nine, but one was too little.”
“Rachel, please,” Mrs. G. said. “I see we have lots of good opinions.”
“We live on the Earth,” Edith said.
“Next week we’ll be studying the solar system,” Mrs. Grimsley said. “So for Monday I would like everyone to read pages 86 to 92 in our book, and to bring in something that has to do with the sun or the planets or moons…”
“…Or asteroids,” Owen thought.
“You can bring in a photograph or a drawing or a website or whatever you want. Now, let’s switch gears. Let’s go to the place we’ve been studying, that existed right here on Earth a long time ago. Let’s go back to…”
“Egypt!” Edith shouted.
~~~
“Ptolomy,” Owen thought, “was an ancient Egyptian astronomer. Maybe a good one, except he didn’t even have a telescope and he thought the earth was the center of the universe.”
What Owen liked to do was look at things through his telescope. He liked looking at the craters on the moon. He liked to look at Jupiter and pretend he was Galileo. He had already seen the moons of Jupiter, and once he saw a comet.
But Owen’s favorite things were asteroids—big, lumpy things, like giant potatoes, floating in space. Thousands and thousands of them in the asteroid belt.
Mrs. Grimsley had started to talk about pharaohs, but Owen was still thinking about asteroids. They were full of valuable minerals. It might even be possible to hollow one out and turn it into a space station. Ceres had lots of water, maybe even more than Earth itself. The asteroids were out there, they were just waiting for miners.
~~~
“Owster, come in. Come in Owster. Owster, do you copy?” Owen slowly came awake. He reached out and touched the vid-plate and the screen filled with the faces of his pals back on moon base.
“Oh, hi you guys,” Owen said. “I was just taking a little nap. It’s been a pretty quiet ride.”
Owen had left moon base over three months ago. Most of the time the asteroid Ceres was nothing more than a speck in the sky. Now when he flipped the plate to exterior view, Ceres filled the whole screen.
“Be setting down planet-side soon, though. Less than 36 hours to go.”
It took a few seconds for words to reach moon base and for a signal to come back.
Then Owen heard a cheer and saw his team start waving and jumping around.
“You’re the right guy for the job,” captain Karen said. “Good luck pal!”
Owen worked with the nav computer to get his little ship parked in a stable orbit around Ceres. He found himself feeling a little excitement, and a little pride, too. He was, after all, the youngest member of the prospecting company. He was chosen for this mission because of the extra-vehicular activity experience he got as a kid growing up an a space station. It didn’t hurt either, he admitted to himself, that he was tough and smart, and afraid of nothing.
Of course, the real reason Owen was now orbiting Ceres might have been the big rush.
His group of spacer friends had formed a little company with the idea of striking it rich in the asteroid belt. All kinds of valuable minerals and metals, and lots of the most valuable commodity of all—water. Everything depended on water, and Ceres could be full of it. The thing was, you had to get there first, prove the water was really there, and then stake a claim. The big companies on Earth had been slow to get started but now they were in a rush to the asteroids.
With the ship in stable orbit, Owen turned over basic operations to the computer. He shoved himself down the central tube into the cargo bay and unlocked the space sled. While that was powering up, he struggled into his EVA suit, snapped the helmet closed, and ran a systems check. Good to go. At his signal, the bay doors opened and the sled, with Owen locked on, dropped into the dark sky—on a long arc down toward Ceres. With no real atmosphere to worry about he knew he could come in fast and not worry about burning up like a meteor.
He gave a brief spurt with the maneuver jets on his space sled as the surface of Ceres flipped from floating above him to filling the view below. He was coming in fast and he had to match his rotation to that of the huge asteroid. When he got that done, the stars were rotating slowly instead of the Ceres. He scanned the gray, pockmarked surface looking for a level valley that would make a good site for well drilling.
Ceres’ gravity, light as it was, had grabbed him now, and he and the sled were still accelerating toward the surface. The altitude numbers spinning in his helmet display turned red. Time to put on the brakes.
“Why not bring her down manually?” he thought, “instead of letting the computer do it. Ought to be a piece of cake.”
So, with practiced skill, he gently worked the sled’s controls. Retro-rockets flared and then tapered off to a slow, steady burn. At just the right moment, Owen cut them off. He and the sled slowly dropped the last few meters to the surface, in a puff of dust.
“Hard to beat that landing,” he said out loud, although there was no one anywhere within a million kilometers to hear. There was no sound on Ceres at all. With only the trace of an atmosphere the only noise on the planetoid was Owen’s own breathing.
The dust was slowly settling back to the surface. Owen scanned the close horizon. Not a bug-eyed monster in sight, of course. Not a living thing. Not a trace of life. The sun, bright but small, was very far away, and Ceres frozen solid.
“Perfect,” Owen said. “No sign of other prospectors. Got the place all to myself.” His suit was keeping him warm and comfy, but his heart was beating fast. He turned and started pulling the sled down a shallow slope to a flat area of gray rubble.
He moved slowly. Here on Ceres he weighed only four pounds, and a hard stomp with either foot would launch him back into space. He got the the sled leveled and then popped the shell. Out came the contraption. Several swipes and taps with a gloved finger started the derrick’s auto setup program. Slowly, like a dragonfly emerging from its chrysalis, the spindly derrick unfolded, every so often a section snapping into place.
While that was happening Owen pulled the collector module from the back of the sled. He aligned it with Sol, initiated deployment sequence, and watched as an enormous filmy toadstool spread toward the sun, pulling in the rays and sending power back to the drill’s battery pack.
“So, all set to start the bore,” Owen said. He flipped the power lever down, starting the drill routine. He watched as the laser-bit curled into Ceres frozen crust, lightly at first, but then with real power. Within a few minutes it was digging deep into the planetoid. Owen could feel the vibration in his boots.
Down went the drill, fast and smooth, until about two kilometers below surface something happened. Owen saw the derrick wobble and the pipe extruder at the top start spraying snow. “Clearly a job for an expert,” he said, as he swung himself up onto the rig and into the grid of girders.
Owen didn’t hear a thing. With several more big wobbles, the entire derrick pulled free of the planetoid’s surface in a geyser of instantly freezing water. The whole rig, drill, girders, and collector, all encased in a block of solid ice, spun away from Ceres and out into the frigid blackness of space.
~~~
It was cold outside. The ponds and lakes were frozen solid, and already the fields were covered with more than a foot of snow. This time of year the sun went down early, so it was dark when Mom called Owen for dinner. The three of them, Mom and Dad and Owen, sat down at the dining room table and started their salad. They were nearly done when a brilliant flash of light made them duck.
“What..?” Dad started to say. He was interrupted by a huge boom that shattered the dining room window and then shook the whole house. Mom fell off her chair, and while she was falling, grabbed Owen. She pulled him with her under the table.
“I saw it!!” Owen shouted as he tried to twist free.
“What, a bomb?” she asked.
“No, a meteor! I saw it streak across the sky. Dad, let’s go find where it fell. We can make a find!”
“Wait a minute, Owen,” Dad said. “Can you still see?
“There’s a glow when I close my eyes, but I can see fine. “Let’s go.”
“It’s dark, Owen, and the window’s broken. But we can go have a look as soon as we clean up the mess and cover the window.”
An hour later they were in the car, heading north, out of town.
“It came down south to the north,” Owen said, “and it must have been pretty close.”
They drove slowly along country roads trying to keep to the higher places so they could scan a wide horizon.
“What are we looking for?” Dad asked.
“I don’t know,” said Owen. “It wouldn’t still be glowing. Sometimes meteorites are icy from the cold of space even though the outer part got burned away as it came through the atmosphere. If we see a lot of lights it might mean someone has already found it.”
“Let’s go home and go to bed and get out here tomorrow,” Dad said.
“Okay,” Owen reluctantly agreed, “but we have to be early.”
They got a few hours sleep, but were back out on the snowy roads well before the sun came up. Several cars went by driving slowly.
“There sure seems to be a lot of traffic out here in the middle of nowhere at this time of day,” Dad said.
“I know,” Owen replied. “A lot of people collect meteorites, and some people sell them.
They can be valuable.”
“Is that why you want it, Owen?
“Come on, Dad, you know I love space stuff. And if if found it I could probably name it.”
“Then what?
“I’d give it to the Geology Museum. Then when I was in college I could come back and study it.”
Old Sol was well up in the sky and they still hadn’t seen anything but other cars. Then, look!” Dad said, pointing past a woodlot and down a hill to a farm several miles away.
“Oh, yeah,” Owen said. “Oh, yeah. That’s it! Let’s go!”
Far down the ridge a dark gray oval spread across part of a cornfield. It looked like
something had smashed into the ground and sent a shower of black earth scattered across the snow.
A car passed them going the other direction. Then a minute later, another one.
“Don’t look where we’re going,” Owen said, staring up hill instead of down at the farm below. Dad drove fast, once in a while looking where they were going, and they had parked the car, trudged through the deep snow, and were digging at the impact site when the other cars started to arrive.
Owen’s shovel clanged on something hard. He wedged the shovel underneath and pried up an odd-shaped blob about the size of a softball. With a gloved hand he reached into the hole and pulled it out. He was dusting it off when a large man carrying a shovel, a metal detector, and a big steel pike, came huffing up behind him.
“I’ll take that.” the man said
“No thanks”, Owen said, “it’s not for sale.”
~~~
Monday morning when Mrs. Grimsley asked who wanted to go first and show something about the solar system, Edith didn’t raise her hand. She just came up front with a very nice poster she had made that showed the sun in the middle and the planets in rings around it. Harold had a photo of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon. Rachel brought in pictures of Martians, but explained how there really weren’t any and these were just artist’s ideas.
“What about you, Owen?” Mrs. Grimsley asked, when everyone else had gone. “What did you bring in?
Owen carried a cardboard box up to the front table, opened it up, carefully removed a heavy, lumpy object and placed it on the table.
“What’s that have to do with the solar system?” Harold asked. “It’s just an old rock.”
No, it’s not,” Owen said. “It didn’t come from Earth. It’s not a piece of this planet at all.
But it is part of the solar system. It used to be an asteroid way out in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.”
“How did it get here?” Rachel asked.
“Did you see or hear or read about the meteor Friday night? This is what made it” Owen said. “I wanted to show you before I give it to the Museum.”
With that, the whole class rushed forward and crowded around Owen and his asteroid.
“Don’t meteorites get names?” Mrs. Grimsley asked.
“Yes, they do,” Owen said. “I should get to name it.”
“What will you call it?” Edith asked.
“Usually you can’t give a meteorite a person’s name,” Owen said, “but if I can, I would like to name this one for my friend Owster, who had a bad accident.”