Black holes are like hungry tigers. Get too close, and you will have a bad day.
Our tiger was named Cygnus X-1, a black hole about 15 times the mass of the sun.
The guidance team and their fancy AI established an "safe exclusion zone" for our first exploration of Cygnus X-1.
The zone was an imaginary sphere where our ability to break away from the clawing gravity starts to become risky.
For extra safety margin, we were told to stay 1800 kilometers farther outside the exclusion zone.
And since we astronauts are a suspicious bunch, the crew privately agreed to stay 1900 kilometers away.
But, strange things started to happen at 2000 kilometers. It was impossible to tell if the space-warping was real or some kind of unknown effect on the wet, squishy computers in our skulls.
Either way, we grabbed some data and called an abort. Maybe the next crew will have a better ride.
Source: Mickey Kulp, 2022, Space Art 57
More at https://www.facebook.com/SpaceArt57
More about Cygnus X-1: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/cygnusx1.html
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