Chapter 552

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Earth, Houston Space Center, USA.

June 22, 2028, 17:22 New York time.

"The latest news from Noah here we are! here we are! Here they are! They arrived safely on Mars... " The female staff staring at the screen are the silent readers at first. When they see the content of the message clearly, she is very excited, and the message is quickly transmitted.

When the Houston Space Center received the latest message from Noah, the whole NASA headquarters was in a state of excitement, even Charles bor. News is spreading at an amazing speed, and NASA is the first to spread the news. Almost all the world's front page news reports are about Noah's successful arrival on Mars.

The media in the United States are covering it all over the world.

This is undoubtedly a phased victory. The five astronauts on board Noah deserve to further refresh the "Horizon" of human beings. The last time they went to the farthest is the moon, and this time it is more distant Mars, which is of extraordinary significance.

In Washington, the White House also sent a spokesman to congratulate the victory.

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On June 22, when the American "Noah" successfully and safely reached the orbit of Mars, and its news was sent back to earth, the world was greatly shocked. At the same time, the Mars Express, which had already set out in mid May, has been sailing for more than a month, with a distance of more than 129 million kilometers.

The propulsion system of Mars Express is very special. Compared with the conventional ion engine, which ejects argon atoms backward at super high speed to obtain thrust, the propulsion system of Mars Express has a bit of opposite taste. Its propulsion engine is not only a conventional fuel propeller, but also a front engine, which uses thousands of lasers to irradiate tens of thousands of sets of lasers Wandao laser uses light sail to propel Mars Express and its "firefly".

Although a thousand laser sets will produce a reverse thrust when it is started, the kinetic energy generated by the light sail is completely acceptable. Only a small part of the thrust is needed to offset the reverse thrust. The acceleration of the whole object driven by the light sail is really fast, but it is not so shocking. On the one hand, it is the energy problem, on the other hand, there are astronauts on the spacecraft The factor of.

However, in the long voyage stage, the acceleration of more than ten times respectively can also bring quite fast acceleration to the spacecraft after a long time of accumulation. In theory, under the ideal state of sufficient material strength and energy output, the continuous acceleration can make the whole spacecraft infinitely close to the speed of light, which only needs to continuously accelerate for 8 months, which is the ideal state.

However, these problems are not the key to the design of Mars Express as the front engine. The most critical factor is the size of the entire spacecraft, the "Mars Express" and "firefly", as well as the sentinel combat base to be built on the surface of Mars, a surface crystal cutting laboratory, two landing vehicles and other miscellaneous materials.

The total volume of the entire spacecraft has been quite amazing. The "firefly" in Mars orbit alone has reached nearly 1500 tons. With other parts, the volume of the whole aircraft is nearly 4000 tons, equivalent to half of the "Tiangong ring orbit star harbor".

Such a huge volume, the actual situation only uses the front engine to be able to safely take this big guy to shuttle between the stars..

Imagine if it's a conventional propulsion system, such as a rocket with a rear mounted engine, its hull structure and material properties must be strong enough to cope with the thrust of the engine. In other words, the structure of the whole aircraft needs to be built like a skyscraper with a solid middle and bottom structure to ensure that such a large spacecraft will not collapse and collapse in the face of strong thrust.

This is why the rocket's body outline is like a spire structure, the upper end is small, the middle and lower layer is huge. For example, the American "Saturn 5" and the current American "Noah" are designed in this way.

However, the front engine is quite different. The hull does not need to be designed as heavy and solid as a super heavy rocket or a building. The biggest requirement is to be as strong as a rope. This is the biggest reason why the total length of Mars Express and firefly once exceeded 1000 meters, and the structure was so slim.

The design of the front engine can greatly reduce the weight of the hull structure, making it possible for the super large spacecraft to cross the long-distance interstellar voyage. It is not an unreachable fantasy to go to the asteroid belt for mining and transportation. Undoubtedly, this is of great significance for interstellar navigation.

Otherwise, why is the American Noah so small? Why is it a pyramid shaped gyroscope? Moreover, due to the carrying capacity, the "Mars project" of the United States has to be divided into three times, and a one-way journey takes nearly half a year. A round-trip between the earth and Mars and the mission time will take almost a year. We have to wait for the golden voyage stage of relative distance. Under the rapid technological changes, how precious time is.It's not that Americans don't have the money. It's not that the big companies involved in the Mars mission don't have money, and the United States is not without money.

The real reason is that the laser technology field is not as good as that of China, and the optical sail technology and solar panel field are also far ahead of China. The vast sea of solar panels in Qinghai Province alone can illustrate some problems.

Not to mention the most critical issue of energy supply, for Americans without purple crystal, this is a real knot that can not be solved. Let alone the problem of mature laser technology, it is that if you want to get enough thrust, you need more fuel to supply the energy output of the laser column, and carrying more fuel means that the size of the spacecraft needs to be increased More thrust, obviously, it's a dead cycle.

But the purple crystal helps CMSX solve the biggest dead cycle, that is, reducing the size of the spacecraft without dropping the energy supply.

Now, in the firefly space.

Ren Hong is sitting on his desk in the centrifuge chamber, staring at the dizzy data on the screen without saying a word. This time, he spent a lot of money to go to Mars not far away from hundreds of millions of kilometers in order to get the purple crystal above.

But obviously, it's not easy to get these crystal ores with lethal attraction on Mars. Ren Hong's biggest concern and concern is how to cut small pieces of such large purple stones. According to the current understanding of the characteristics of purple source crystals, he estimated that he wanted to collect scattered crystal fragments at the falling point It's a bit impractical.

Even nuclear bomb bombardment can't decompose this kind of stone. This time, such a large "terminator" has fallen to the surface of Mars. Maybe even pieces of debris and slag will not fall off, which means manual cutting from the big guy one by one.

Ren Hong did invent the technology of cutting purple source crystal, that is, "condensation cutting method", but it is in the favorable external environment on the earth and the size of the cut object, and so on. Facing a "terminator" calculated by the unit of kilometer, it is really urgent to grasp the head.

This is Mars, not the earth. The environment is harsh. It is also a relatively difficult problem to create an ultra-low temperature environment with infinitely close to absolute zero. The unavoidable harsh actual environmental requirements that we are facing need to be met by a mobile low-temperature laboratory.

Fortunately, he has a large number of purple crystal stones full of energy. A series of activities to be carried out on Mars need massive energy as support. Whether it is the sentinel base, mobile cutting laboratory, especially the mobile laboratory for manufacturing ultra-low temperature environment, what drives its operation is a big consumer of energy consumption. Fortunately, it has high energy storage It can support the huge energy consumption of a series of equipment.

"Old Well, no, Professor Wang. There was a message from Earth command seven minutes ago Just then, Shockley, who played the role of his assistant, came to him.

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