The probe Deep Space Monitor 79 records a disturbance in the Solar system that was triggered by the exposure of the monolith on the dark side of the Moon to sunlight. Several other probes record the same thing, and send data to Earth. The data tells the scientists that there is something on one of Saturn's moons, Iapetus, that is related to the monolith on the Earth's Moon, and Discovery's destination becomes thus decided. (p. 80)
"A hundred million miles beyond Mars, in the cold loneliness where no man had yet traveled, Deep Space Monitor 79 drifted slowly among the tangled orbits of the asteroids. For three years it had fulfilled its mission flawlessly - a tribute to the American scientists who had designed it, the British engineers who had built it, the Russian technicians who had launched it. A delicate spider-web of antennas sampled the passing waves of radio noise - the ceaseless crackle and hiss of what Pascal, in a simpler age, had naively called the "silence of infinite space." Radiation detectors noted and analyzed incoming cosmic rays from the galaxy and points beyond; neutron and X-ray telescopes kept watch on strange starts that no human eye would ever see; magnetometers observed thee gusts and hurricanes of the solar winds, as the Sun breathed million-mile-an-hour blasts of tenuous plasma into the faces of its circling children. All these things, and many others, were patiently noted by Deep Space Monitor 79, and recorded in into its crystalline memory." - p. 80
| Title | Publication Type | Year | Creator |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2001: A Space Odyssey (novel and film) | Narrative, Movie, Novel | Arthur Charles Clarke, Stanley Kubrick |
