Starfarers, 3.
From Sol to Sirius and back is a seventeen year round trip, a relativistic month on the zero-zero drive, plus a year to explore the Sirian System where Sirius B, a white dwarf, orbits A, a blue giant, at thirty kilometers per hour. A has red prominences and an opal corona. B, rotating rapidly, has storms in an atmosphere only a few kilometers high.
The exploratory team places a station in orbit around B. The station launches a heavily shielded probe that laser-beams data. The probe approaches B until its defenses are overwhelmed, thus gaining otherwise unobtainable information about mass distributions, vectors, fields, fluxes etc.
Sirius features prominently in literature and fiction. See here.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I did it, I started reading STARFARERS. But I'm still only in the Prologue. A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS will have to wait, I fear! (Smiles)
Ad astra! Sean
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