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STEPHEN BAXTER
TITAN
THE NASA TRILOGY
HarperVoyagerAn imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 1997
Copyright © Stephen Baxter 1997
Cover photo © NASA
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Stephen Baxter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780006498117
Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007502066 Version: 2015-10-07
For Tony, Christine and Catherine
CONTENTS
Book Five: Extravehicular Activity
After seven years of flight, after travelling a billion miles from Earth, the human spacecraft Cassini reached Saturn.
Cassini was about the size of a school bus. Thick, multi-layer insulation blankets covered most of the craft’s structure and radiation-hardened equipment. The blankets’ outermost layer was translucent amber-coloured Kevlar, with shiny aluminum beneath; the two layers together made it look as if the spacecraft had been sewn into gold.
But Cassini looked its age.
The blankets were yellowed, and showed pits and scars from micrometeorite impacts. The brave red, white and blue flags and logos of the US, NASA, ESA and the contributing European countries, fixed as decals on the insulation, had faded badly in the years since launch. Cassini’s close approach to the sun, with the intense heat and solar wind there, had done most of the damage.
A fat pie-dish shape, ten feet across, clung to the side of the Cassini
