Nina stared
at the spreadsheet. Many people envisioned that astrophysics was all about
gazing through the eye pieces of telescopes, or looking at images downloaded
from satellites. To be fair, that made up a bit, but it wasn’t the bulk of
everything. Most of astrophysics came down to spreadsheets and numbers.
Radio,
x-ray, and microwave telescopes worked more by data than images. The numbers
could be applied to images, and even the radio signals could be hooked up to
speakers to produce sounds, but a lot of it was number-crunching data through
spreadsheets and databases.
She stared at the data from Zheng He’s nanosats. The platform had let out one thousand of the sail-bearing satellites, casting them into the dark energy winds so they could map out the patterns.
Just like
the tiny probes put into earth-bound tornadoes, the satellites went where the
wind carried them. And she stared at the numbers on the spreadsheet. Each
satellite would transmit a pulse every second. Each pulse only contained the
specific ID of the satellite. With Zhen He at one end of the solar system,
Frontier at the other, and Earth in the middle, They could triangulate the
location of each probe when it sent the signal by measuring the time it took
for the signal to reach each point.
And Nina
now collated all of that data, looking at the individual timestamps from each
position for each satellite. The data rolled in at a snail’s pace. Despite the
satellites pulsing every second, they were received hours apart. On average, a
pulse arrived after five hours. Some were quicker, if they changed direction to
come back closer to the solar system. Others even sped up, taking over nine
hours for each pulse to arrive.
Even so, there were one-thousand
satellites to track, as it arrived at each triangulation point in the solar system.
The spreadsheet in front of her represented ten minutes’ worth of transmissions
from one satellite, coming in over the last 127 days, and clocking in—Heh—at 600 rows. Once she verified that
there was no corrupt data in the spreadsheet, she could feed the numbers into a
coordinate calculation, which could be used to generate the specific path of
this satellite.
She hit
page down to bring up the next set of numbers. As the numbers blurred, so did
her vision. She rubbed tired, burned out eyes and blindly sipped at her coffee.
She was three hours into this.
Why isn’t an intern doing this? Oh, right.
Payback for the green screen. Jenny needs a better sense of humor. Walker only
escaped because they’re dating. You know what, screw this. After this
satellite, I’m making an intern do this. Yeah, right. Like the interns aren’t
responsible for five satellites each. Hope Peterson gets that projection
program working soon so we can turn a lot of this over to the supercomputers.
She opened
her eyes, scanned through the numbers, and paged down to row 476. She scanned
the numbers, noting no corruption of the number sets until something caught her
eye on 507. It had duplicate numbers as the row before it. All three
triangulation points registered identical numbers. In row 508 the numbers had
changed, but only minutely.
Row 509 was
identical to the row before it. And then 510 was slightly different. She
quickly scanned through more rows, matching up identical timestamps, sometimes
for three rows, a few times for four, but mostly for pairs. The pattern
continued to the end of the dataset.
She copied
the data and fed it into the mapping program. The satellite tracked on an
erratic path, subject to the dark energy winds, and then, as it got to the rows
she had noticed, the satellite stopped. It didn’t move any longer, at least not
with any kind of real speed. Before, the satellite it had been moving at
approximately 1.6 light years per hour; now it travelled in kilometers per second.
According to calculations, it was moving at over 190 km/s, but that was nothing
compared to before.
“It’s . . .
stuck. But if it hit something, why didn’t it simply obliterate. It would have
been carrying enough speed to vaporize if it struck ordinary matter. What the
hell?”