Endeavour is a large ship with over 50 people on board, a diverse crew of experts, but they have only 3 weeks to investigate the entire alien ship before they get too close to the Sun and have to take off and escape the heat. By the time the space ship Endeavour is able to catch up to Rama a few weeks later, it is inside the orbit of Venus. SPACEGUARD detected it outside the orbit of Jupiter. It may even burn up if it gets too close. Rama is moving fast and falling toward the Sun. Mankind is about to get a very large unexpected guest. Gravimetric readings during the flyby indicate without a doubt that it is hollow. It's assumed to be a natural object until a flyby of a cluster of robot probes shows that is it actually a geometrically perfect cylinder twenty kilometers long. It's an academic curiosity in the world of astronomy, so they name it Rama instead of a number ID. This comes in handy when SPACEGUARD detects the approach of a new unknown object from extrasolar space, in the year 2130. Responsively, the Earth creates SPACEGUARD to identify and track every single object in the Solar System. The book starts off in the year 2177 when a metallic asteroid impacts in northern Italy, killing 600,000 and wiping out incalculable cultural artifacts.
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