Inside Rama, they discover two plains that stretch across the interior circumference, divided by a frozen body of water they name the Cylindrical Sea.

The United Planets follows their progress closely, and scientists are assembled to form a Rama Committee that considers theories and advises Commander Norton.

As Rama drifts closer to the sun, the Cylindrical Sea melts, the temperature shift causes a storm, and three massive lights activate on each plain to illuminate the world.

Boris Rodrigo, a crewman who adheres to a space-inspired sect of Christianity, suggests that Rama is a new Noah's Ark that will change course to begin orbiting the sun.

The crew floats across the Cylindrical Sea on a raft to reach an island they name New York, and a sample of the water reveals the presence of microorganisms.

The crewman Jimmy Pak approaches Norton to admit that he smuggled a sky-bike onto their ship and offers to fly it above a cliff to reach the southern plain.

Pak realizes that a static field is building around the spikes, which then emits a concussion that knocks his sky-bike out of the air and destroys it, stranding him in the southern plain.

Inside they find a collection of holograms that provide details on various Raman artefacts, including a suit designed for a three-legged humanoid.

John Leonard of The New York Times, while finding Clarke "benignly indifferent to the niceties of characterization", praised the novel for conveying "that chilling touch of the alien, the not-quite-knowable, that distinguishes sci-fi at its most technically imaginative".

[5] The novel received the following awards: The interior of Rama is essentially a large cylindrical landscape, dubbed "The Central Plain" by the crew, 16 kilometres in diameter and nearly 50 long, with artificial gravity provided by its 0.25 rpm spin.

It is split into the "northern" and "southern" plains, divided in the middle by a 10-km wide expanse of water the astronauts dub the "Cylindrical Sea".

In the center of the Cylindrical Sea is an island of unknown purpose covered in tall, skyscraper-like structures, which the astronauts name "New York" due to an imagined similarity to Manhattan.

The airlocks open into the hub of the massive bowl shaped cap at the North Pole, with three 8-kilometre long stair systems, called Alpha, Beta, and Gamma by the crew, leading to the plain.

The Northern plain contains several small "towns" interconnected by roads, dubbed London, Paris, Peking, Tokyo, Rome, and Moscow.

[8] The focus and style of the last three novels are quite different from those of the original with an increased emphasis on characterisation and clearly-portrayed heroes and villains, rather than Clarke's dedicated professionals.

A graphic adventure computer game of the same name with a text parser based on the book was made in 1984 by Trillium and ported to other systems such as the Apple II, Commodore 64.

David Fincher, touted on Revelations' Rama web page as far back as 2001,[13] stated in a late 2007 interview that he was still attached to helm.

[22] Clarke created the space study program which detects Rama, Project Spaceguard, as a method of identifying near-Earth objects on Earth-impact trajectories; in the novel it was initiated in 2077.

[23] After interest in the dangers of asteroid strikes was heightened by a series of Hollywood disaster films, the United States Congress gave NASA authorisation and funding to support Spaceguard.