COSMIC ARCHIVEAll expeditions

03 / ECHOES OF THE FAR SUN

Beneath the Ring

HAUMEA · EXPEDITION 014
014

CHAPTER IV · FOLLOW A QUESTION

Does the light follow your lamp?

A warm line shines on the ice. Pick up the worklight, examine the wall, then move the lamp to test your idea.

≈
SOL / MARA / NIA · FIELD CHANNEL

Move with arrows / WASD, the direction pad or tap the ground. Tap the action button or press Space: its label tells you what happens here. Walking lowers the visor.

Checkpoints last for this visit. Reentering starts a new journey.

The real Haumea

The landing, ice cliffs, caves, crew and listening device are fiction. No spacecraft has mapped this terrain. The unresolved radio echo is part of the story, not evidence of extraterrestrial life.

NASA · Haumea

Pause

What we found, and how

Your route · walking distances compressed

The real Haumea

Haumea is an elongated dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, rotating in about four hours, with two known moons. The outline below is a schematic, not a photograph.

Hubble image of Haumea and two faint moons

Actual Hubble observation · 30 June 2015. Haumea and its two moons appear as points of light. This image does not resolve the ice cliffs or the fictional landing site.

NASA, ESA, D. Ragozzine (BYU); processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/CUA). NASA / Hubble
Schematic · elongated body, ring and two moons · not to scale
Schematic · elongated body, ring and two moons · not to scale

A 2017 stellar occultation revealed a ring about 2,287 km from Haumea’s centre and about 70 km wide. Its real appearance from the surface is not measured here.

Visor model: an equatorial annulus, a spherical 800 km reference body and an observer at 45° latitude. Ring dimensions follow the paper; the body approximation, viewpoint, terrain and enhanced brightness are illustrative.

Three illustrative star sightlines sweep across the annulus in accelerated time. Their brightness decreases when the sightline intersects ring material. This is a geometry demonstration, not measured occultation footage.

The landing, ice cliffs, caves, crew and listening device are fiction. No spacecraft has mapped this terrain. The unresolved radio echo is part of the story, not evidence of extraterrestrial life.

NASA · HaumeaOriginal research · the 2017 occultation

HAUMEA · EXPEDITION 014

Exploration complete · Beneath the Ring

You compared directions, found the hidden gallery and followed its echo into the northern valley. Mara held the bridge until you secured the far bank. The original record points to the next relay, farther from the Sun.

Next: A Light for Whoever Comes NextReturn to the collection