Chapter 9-16 Summary

The Endeavour spaceship sends a special communication to the Rama Committee. The communication describes the details of the reconnaissance mission's findings. It outlines the analysis of the visual data collected after the launch of five long delay lighting flares inside Rama. The explorers depict a complex structure consisting of two circular hemispheres on opposite ends of one fifty-kilometer-long cylinder using terms borrowed to earth's geography. The members of the Committee debate what this discovery means to the human race as a whole. They envision that Rama must be similar to an Ark for an alien civilization fleeing some catastrophic event. They deduct from its estimated trajectory that the vessel must have traveled for at least a few hundred thousand years, and possibly even millions of years, before reaching the solar system. They also speculate that the Ramans are probably dead and...