Chapter 472 - 463 Venus_1

B-level Base.

It was 3 a.m. on July 20th, and Xiao Okada had been up all night, now sitting tiredly in the chair for a quick rest.

Although the other staff members were also on duty, they were in a rather relaxed state, their dedication somewhat less than that of the security guards in the guardroom.

"Thank you."

As Shen Zuozhou took the sugared and milked coffee and glanced at the out-of-sorts crowd, his face couldn’t help but twitch.

In the evening, the two Venus detectors, "Tai Bai" and "Morning Star No.1," had sent back signals indicating their impending arrival, and the deep-space exploration team had been waiting here ever since for the detectors to enter orbit and transmit photos—a wait that had stretched on for seven or eight hours without the craft entering orbit.

He asked Xiao Okada if there was a problem, but Okada just waved his hand indifferently, expressing his trust in the AI. The two Venus detectors were equipped with the most advanced ternary chips, and no anomalies had been detected in the power systems, so there was definitely nothing wrong.

But Shen Zuozhou could not be so complacent. This was the country’s first detection project of an extraterrestrial planet, and it was Venus, a subject of great interest, with the Aerospace Development Committee still awaiting news!

However, there really wasn’t much that could be done at the base now. Humanity’s understanding of Venus was far less than that of Mars, especially domestically, which was almost zero, so they had to trust the professional team.

Shen Zuozhou’s attention settled on the No.2 robot standing quietly in the corner, feeling that the base had gone too far in its approach to artificial intelligence.

Take, for instance, the No.2 robot; they produced more than twenty units in an attempt to replace service jobs within the base. After a few months, except for the canteen where the staff’s demand for "a soul" kept the cooks persisting, nearly all cleaning and living services were dominated by robots.

At first, the robots were just a novelty; their skins and head molds were custom-ordered from domestic adult manufacturers, but then the base began to develop its own technologies, and the robots started to look more and more like humans, until their skin was virtually indistinguishable from that of real people. Coupled with increasingly skilled AI training, an ordinary person would hardly be able to recognize them, whether by posture or appearance.

Moreover, these deployed robots were all custom-made, with varying heights and body types; prolonged interaction with them truly gave off a sense of an intelligence crisis.

Not to mention the production aspects. The base’s equipment was still undergoing continuous automation improvements, aiming to ensure that everything here could be controlled by supercomputing, stubbornly achieving significant efficiency gains without any hardware innovation.

Jingou Rocket Manufacturing Base, which had come to learn, although not as bold in their approach, also started to test run AI logistics, warehousing, and production plan management. Internal testing reportedly revealed local efficiency gains of up to 500% and an overall increase of more than 40%, which was particularly terrifying.

The base was advanced in every way, no one knowing how many astounding technologies were hidden beneath its mysterious facade.

Oh, and there are some unconfirmed rumors about the base:

An expert wanted to get his good-for-nothing, gilded son from abroad a job here. Lin Ju agreed without a second thought and offered him a mid-level tech management position.

At that time, the aerospace experts in the know thought that the young man would surely cause trouble. To their surprise, upon entering the base, the previously inept lad began to study hard, work diligently, and show immense loyalty to the company, refusing to divulge any details—transformed into a completely different person.

Outsiders spread rumors that the base performed brainwashing, but Shen Zuozhou admired it instead, believing that the atmosphere here really was positive and healthy—a pureland for scientific research.

The Space Bureau had to learn not just about production, but more importantly, about creating a good work environment!

"Beep—beep—beep—"

"Here it comes!"

Xiao Okada, who had been half-lying down, leapt to his feet. The engineers, nearly dozing off, instantly sprang into work mode.

Of course, in reality, the best-case scenario was that they had nothing to do; the detectors, functioning normally and following their own plans, were the optimal solution.

The current distance between Venus and Earth was roughly 50 million kilometers, with electromagnetic waves taking more than two minutes to make a single trip, a delay that was much greater than that from the Moon.

The central screen in the control room began to slowly load an image. One of the downsides of super-long-distance communication was the limited transmission bandwidth. The photos taken by the detectors were large in size, and getting back a single image in 10 minutes was considered "light-speed"; waiting hours for one was commonplace.

However, more important than the images was the orbital data, and with these simple figures, the control room immediately confirmed the position of the two detectors.

Although launched a day apart, their arrival times were only a few hours different. "Tai Bai" had already entered orbit and was using the Hall Thruster to correct its orbit, transmitting back its first photo.

Morning Star No.1 was a bit behind; instead of decelerating into orbit, it would enter the atmosphere directly, with an estimated two to three hours before atmospheric contact and starting its sampling mission.

Morning Star No.1 was the focus of attention; as long as "Tai Bai" could orbit, there wouldn’t be much trouble—it could operate there, collecting data for over a dozen years.

After about 13 minutes, the first image from "Tai Bai" finished loading completely.

This was a photo it had taken at an altitude of 3400 kilometers. Venus, although appearing close, still only occupied a small portion of the huge image frame.

But that didn’t matter. The 4.1-meter diameter, ultra-large lens made by Changchun Optical Manufacturing provided stunning clarity.

Xiao Okada began to zoom in on the super high-definition image, which was hundreds of megabytes in size, until the contours of Venus’s surface were completely revealed.

From the current angle, Venus appeared as a perfectly round, true golden planet, with rich details astonishingly displayed.

Volcanoes on its surface were strikingly clear in the photo, and adjacent to them was a valley that had clearly been shaped by flowing liquids.

Leaving aside its extremely hostile atmosphere, Venus indeed resembled a planet that might have once harbored life—perhaps it even does now.

Xiao Okada continued to zoom in. "Tai Bai" had a resolution of 1 meter at this distance, sufficient to see the terrain and topography of the planet’s surface.

The enlarged ground filled the huge screen that blended into the corner of the wall, with Shen Zuozhou staring at it, obsessively not wanting to miss a single detail.

This was the Solar System’s planet most similar to Earth, yet uniquely rotating in the opposite direction. Its orbital period was 225 days, but its rotation period was 243 days—a day longer than a year, wrapped in mystery.

There was also plenty of research suggesting that microorganisms might very well exist on the planet. Whatever kind of oddities they were, they would be the first real extraterrestrial life forms discovered by humanity.

With intense anticipation, he immediately began to check the data for "Morning Star No.1," the only probe that might hope to discover life on Venus.

In addition to the Flyby capturing samples from the outer atmosphere for return, the lander would also intentionally slow down while passing through the sulfuric acid clouds to try and gather microbes. Despite struggling to survive against 90 times Earth’s atmospheric pressure, sulfuric acid rain, temperatures of 400 degrees, and storms, it would faithfully carry out its mission.