The mathematical formulations must be precise. Should an object in the middle of this interplanetary tug of war wander from its position by more than a few degrees, the delicate equilibrium becomes upset and its orbit will rapidly degrade.
In SOHO's case the L1 point equaled four times the distance from our world to the moon, with any significant deviation from that point certain to result in an uncontrolled plunge toward either the earth or sun. One complication the observatory's development team had to address, however, was that their preferred orbital position for SOHO was slightly off the L1 point, since the radio interference that would occur when it was in direct line between the two opposing spheres was bound to corrupt its data transmissions with static. A second problem was that other bodies in the solar system--distant planets, moons, asteroids--had their own weaker attractions that could jiggle SOHO's path a little bit this way or that to ultimately disastrous effect.
The team's solution to both these problems was to equip SOHO with an onboard propulsion system for periodic orbital adjustments, knowing this imposed an inherent limitation on its mission life. For once it exhausted the hydrazine fuel that powered its thrusters, SOHO would slip from its desired Lagrangian station and go tumbling off through space beyond recovery.
Original projections were that the billion-dollar spacecraft would be able to conduct its observations and experiments for from two to five years before the propellent reserves went dry and its mission reached an end.
Six years later and counting, it was still plugging away.
Some things are still built to last, and every so often they last longer than expected.
In March 2002, SOHO's SWAN and MDI/SOI instruments, two of a dozen scientific devices in its payload module, sniffed the astrophysical equivalent of what American prairie farmers once would have called a locust wind.
An acronym for Solar Wind Anisotropies, SWAN is an ultraviolet survey of the dispersed hydrogen cloud around our planetary system that can detect glowing hot spots in space caused by fluctuations of solar radiation. To the SWAN's wide-angle eye, which charts the full sky around the sun three times each week, a surge in the emissions striking these areas will cause them to light up like flashes from warning beacons even if the surge originates beyond the sun's visible face, outside the range of earthbound telescopes.
MDI/SOI--short for Michelson Doppler Imager/Solar Oscillations Investigation--is more direct in its approach, measuring wave motions that vibrate through the convective layer of the sun. Depending on their amplitude, deviations from the wavelengths commonly registered by MDI/ SOI can put scientists on the lookout for helioseismological events that are roughly analogous to earthquakes and may be indicators of impending solar flare activity.
Relayed to earth by its telemetry arrays in near-real time, SOHO's information about the flurry of concurrent beacon flashes and solar tremors did not take long to create a stir of excitement in its command-and-control center in Maryland.
Two men in particular got the headline-making jump on the rest of the pack.
Cold Corners Base, Antarctica
Nimec ate the last bit of his turkey sandwich and set the empty plate onto a cafeteria tray beside him. Then he lifted his demitasse off the table and sipped.
"Well?" Megan said. "I await your verdict."
"Mmm-mm," he said.
"I may be a princess," she said. "But I'm known for my benevolence, truthfulness, and good taste."
He grunted. "About arranging for that helicopter . . ."
She made a preemptive gesture. "After we've had our coffee."
He sat with the steaming espresso in his hand, watching her drink from her cup. It contained a double something-or-other with caffeine, flavored syrup, and a light head of froth.
Several minutes passed in silence that way.
"Okay, Pete," she said at last, dabbing her upper lip with a napkin. "The chopper aside, what's on your mind?"
"That line sounds very familiar," he said.
She nodded. "It does. It also got a straight answer out of me."
He looked at her without comment.
"Come on," she said. "I didn't miss your backpacker's travel guide remarks about hearing how people find spiritual cleansing, harmony, and oneness among the king penguins. Or your question about whether I've joined that righteous crowd. Or most of all your long looks. Something's bothering you. I think we should get it out in the open."
Nimec kept looking at her, then finally expelled a breath.
"You told me you came to Antarctica because the boss asked," he said. "Or at least you implied that. But I hear you volunteered."
Megan lowered her cup into its saucer, waited as someone came moving past on his way from the service counter to another table.
"It seems you've been hearing a lot of things," she said when he'd gone.
"Not from you," he said. "That's the problem. We never consulted about your reassignment."
"You're being unfair. I let you know a month beforehand."
"After the decision was already made."
"Pete--"
"I'd just like you to tell me why I wasn't advised sooner," he said. "All the years we've worked together, depended on each other, you never left me hanging. And then you did."
"Pete, I'm sorry. Honestly. I didn't realize that was how you felt."
"Then tell me. Straight answer."
Their eyes met. And held.
"It's sort of complicated," she said. "Gord wanting me here is the truth, but he's the one to give you his reasons. As for myself, there were personal issues."
"They involve Bob Lang?"
"Yes," she said. "I preferred not to share them at the time."
He nodded. Their eyes remained locked.
"And now?"
"I'd still rather not."
"You change your mind, I'll be ready to listen."
"I know, Pete," she said. "And thank you."
He nodded again and sat there quietly finishing his espresso.
She reached out, touched his arm.
"Are we okay, Pete? Settled, I mean."
"Settled."
They were silent another minute, her hand still on his arm, squeezing it gently.
"All right," he said then. "Coffee's done. We should discuss the helicopter."
She nodded, reached down into the kangaroo pocket of her bib-alls, and extracted a connected Palm computer.
"All the luxuries of home," he commented.
Megan slipped the computer's stylus out of its silo and tapped its "on" button.
"We try to be with it," she said with a shrug. "Now hush, I need to jot out an e-mail. We're presently short-handed as far as pilots go, but I'll explain that later. Meanwhile, I think I've figured out how to kill two birds with one electronic stone."
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, Maryland
The men were known as Ketchup and Fries.
These were of course not their given names.
Ketchup was really Jonathan Ketchum, a sixty-year-old project scientist at the Experimenters' Operations Facility in Goddard's Building 26, the operational nucleus of the SOHO project. He had been with the EOF's permanent MDI/SOI team since its establishment in the mid-nineties, and was considered one of its top men by the principal investigator.
Fries was Richard Frye, another member of the MDI/ SOI team. At twenty-six, he was its most recent addition, regarded as a babe in the woods by senior group members. This is the embedded reflex of those with tenure who are protective of their own status. Ketchum saw in Frye an inquisitiveness and joy of discovery that was like a bright reflection of himself as a young man. He knew Frye was already a better scientist than most, and had potential to be the best by far.
Ketchum had taken Frye under his wing from the start of the young man's NASA employment, but their student-mentor relationship soon grew into an intellectually stimulating bond of equals. Ketchum imparted a maturity of understanding to Frye; Frye helped recharge Ketchum's sense of wond
erment daily.
Together they had become a team within a team.
Ketchup and Fries.
Nobody could say with any certainty who had cooked up the nickname. Because its ingredients included a heaping measure of disparagement, and perhaps a pinch of envy, credit went unclaimed and unassigned.
In the beginning they found the label vexatious. Eventually, however, they came to bear it with a certain defiant fondness. At some point their feelings became almost proprietary. Ketchup. Fries. What would one be without the other?
Besides, just look at the crap the visiting observers regularly threw at them.
The Auslanders, as they'd been tagged (again without attribution), were a group of scientists from institutions in France, Switzerland, Germany, the U.K., and a handful of other European Space Agency nations who had either contributed to the design and construction of SOHO's gadgetry or were involved in studying its returns. All SOHO's participants could retrieve this information from an archived, indexed, easily searchable electronic database without ever leaving their respective countries, but guest committees from abroad would sometimes show up at Goddard during research campaigns that engaged several of the observatory's instruments at once.
Ostensibly their motivation was pure and unselfish, springing from a desire to help foster a spirit of international collaboration and share in the immediacy and excitement of these campaigns. The real, dirty scrub was that the Web curators of "collaborating" institutions often delayed inputting e-base updates about major discoveries, while their employers raced to contact news organizations and grab the glory--and subsequent funding windfalls--for themselves. It was a good bet that every principal investigator had a number that would provide fast access to a local CNN bureau chief programmed into his phone's memory.
A joint operation to examine the current cyclical peak of sunspot activity had been under way for over two years now without the EOF group's foreign colleagues showing any inclination whatsoever to pay them a house call. Then, lo and behold, with the recent evidence from SWAN and MDI/SOI that the sun had developed an acute case of the measles on its far side, they had come pouring into Goddard from astrophysics labs around the world, arriving with effervescent camaraderie, bon jour, gutten tag, and cheerio. And though the NASA scientists did acknowledge that both solar observation devices primarily responsible for the new findings were European in origin, they were resentfully convinced their co-investigators--a.k.a. unwanted party crashers, a.k.a. the Auslanders--were pushing and bumping their way through the door for one reason, and one alone: to make sure nobody at NASA beat them to the flash-dial button.
Today Frye had made it his godly mission to get to the EOF well ahead of the polyglot horde, and was probably at his workstation hours before they had begun to yawn, blink, and stretch through their morning wake-up routines. He himself had been unable to catch any sleep after bringing home printouts of the previous evening's final MDI/ SOI data logs, and using them as the basis for an intricate series of equations prepared with what remained his three favorite computational tools--a #3 pencil, a legal pad, and his own scrupulously logical brain. All the observables told him that the sun's helioseismologic agitation had increased by tremendous--in fact, nearly exponential--leaps and bounds in the last twenty-four hour period, and he'd been eager to do two things: check the overnight logs for further changes, and see how his data and math jibed with the latest information from SWAN, whose nonresident Auslander monitoring area just happened to be on the other side of a glass partition from his own true-blue resident project scientist area . . . and, well, well, wouldn't you know, it also just happened to be unoccupied at that early hour.
Now he sat at a bank of display terminals, pondering SWAN's most recent full-sky maps of the sun . . . or more accurately, the sun's hydrogen envelope. Each spectroscopic image had been composed over a regular three-day interval, and was color-graded to profile the radiation intensities--"hot" and "cool" spots--of different coordinates on the envelope. Because the probe was in an almost stationary position relative to earth, following its elliptical revolutions around the sun, the equatorial solar plane showed up as elongated, and each map resembled an Easter egg splashed with various shades of purple, orange, green, and yellow.
Soon Frye's heart was pounding. He got out his cellular phone and rang his complementary half at home.
"Hello?"
"Ketch, what're you doing?"
"Dripping shower water on my bedroom carpet at the moment," Ketchum said. "Do you know what time it is?"
"Time for you to get your ass over here to the center."
"What've you turned up?" Ketchum's tone had abruptly swung from mild annoyance to sharpest curiosity.
"Look, you remember that bullet we dodged last April . . . the solar flare that would've been all hell if it hadn't missed Earth?"
"Of course," Ketchum said. "The X-17 . . ."
"Well, I think we're about to find ourselves downstream from a roarer that'll make our X-17 look like a cap gun popping off."
"Are you certain you're not overestimating--"
"This one looks like the beast, Ketch. I mean it. The fucking beast. And it'll be charging right at us once it's hatched."
Ketchum took an audible breath at the other end of the line.
"I'm on my way," he said.
Marble Point, Antarctica
(77deg25' S, 163deg49' E)
"Hey, Russ, you're back in right the nick. Got an e-mail inside from that unbelievable redhead over at Cold Corners."
Russ Granger jumped from the Bell's cockpit onto the helipad, his boots mashing down on thumbnail ripples of white powdery snow, a coat he figured had to be close to a foot deep. When he'd left two hours earlier to fly a sling-load of food rations out to the Lake Hoare camp in Taylor Valley, the landing area was clear, its markings visible from a good altitude. But that was how it was in this place. Sastrugi, as the wavy drifts of snow were called, formed quickly parallel to a rising wind, and it had picked up a great deal since his departure.
He looked at the parka-clad station manager. Though the sky was still showing a lot of blue, snowflakes were blowing through the air from some widely spaced cloud scuds that had come in over the ice shelf.
"Megan Breen?" Granger said.
The station manager's hooded head bobbed up and down. "You heard me say 'unbelievable,' right? Should I have added the word 'hot'?"
Granger pulled up his own fleece-trimmed hood against the stinging flurries.
"That woman's a hundred percent business, Chuck," he said. "Take my word for it, there's nothing in that message to make either of us sweaty."
Chuck Trewillen motioned to his rear. Beyond the depot's fuel lines stood three orange Quonset huts and a couple of old dozers, their shovels heaped with snow. Beyond them was another small building that had served as Trewillen's isolated home for the half decade he'd held his job at Marble Point. Beyond that building there was only the great sawtoothed jut of the Wilson Piedmont Glacier.
"You ought to hear the noises that glacier makes when it's calving bergs," Trewillen said. "It sort of pants and moans. I'm talking loud, deep moooooans." He shrugged. "Sometimes they're enough to get me worked up."
Granger smiled, clapped Trewillen on the shoulder. "You've been out here alone way too long, man," he said, and started toward the computer hut.
Granger paused in the entrance to the air-heated Quonset, stamped caked snow off his boots, and unzipped his jacket. Then he sat at the desktop and tapped a key to erase its screen-saver--flamingos on a tropical beach, lush palms and turquoise water in the background.
The beach scene gave way to an e-mail application's opening window. Granger dragged and clicked to the In-box, and saw Megan Breen's message at the top of its queue--the single new one. Its title was simply his first name in caps followed by a string of exclamation marks.
Typical Megan, he thought.
The message itself was also characteristically brief and straight to the point:
>
Russ,
A colleague from San Jose has come down to find our missing people and he needs your assist ASAP. Hopes to borrow you from Mac for a flyby of B. Pass. Let me know when you can make it.
Best/MB
Granger fished a hard pack of Marlboros from his open jacket, put a smoke in his mouth, and fired it up with his disposable lighter. Given the extreme urgency of Megan's request, he knew that clearing it with his bosses at McMurdo wasn't anything to worry about.
He frowned, dragging on the cigarette.
No, it definitely wouldn't be a problem.
The real problem was this "colleague" she'd mentioned, and the complications his arrival could bring about for the people who really padded Granger's bankroll enough to make living in this stinking, abominable icebox worthwhile . . . and further down the line, the serious mess it could churn up for Granger himself.
He took another deep hit off the cig and its tip flared. It wouldn't be much fun springing the bad news on the Consortium, but he'd have to get in touch with them, see how they wanted him to handle the situation.
Yeah, he thought. The thing was to contact Zurich directly, let the kingfish have it in front of him.
ASAP.
Inverness, Scotland
Nan Gorrie looked again at her watch and once more at the stove, where a fine piece of mutton sat in a soup of juice and rapidly coagulating fat. Her husband usually rang ahead the few times a year he might be late; he'd been awfully distracted this past week, and she preferred to hope that he had forgotten, rather than worrying something had happened to him. There had been a few occasions as a constable that he'd gotten into scrapes, but none that had risen to the level of what she might call actual danger. As a detective, his days ran at an even pace. His nature helped pour oil on the seas, smoothing the swells; if he felt apprehension, she had rarely known it.
Cold War (2001) Page 13
