Ursula Doorne had known when she accepted the much-sought-after astronomy position up here on the Moon that she would not get to spend all her time on her specialty. She’d need to apply some significant amount of her time to using her EE degree to deal with the more mundane aspects of the settlement and of the various outposts where the radio telescopes were located.
But it always felt good to be able to return to her primary specialty, to analyze the reams and reams of data pouring in from the various radio telescopes under her purview, to determine what new observations would be needed in the light of what they were learning from the latest. And that was just the deep-space work that had always been her primary area of interest. Now, with the Sun in an unsettled state, she had an even greater reason to want to get back to her office quickly.
True, she was well aware that many of her colleagues on the ground were specialists in solar astronomy and knew far better how to read the reams of data she was dealing with. However, she also knew that a number of them had ceased communicating since the current crisis began. Some of them were just in areas where modern digital communication systems were thin on the ground, and were lucky if they could even manage to check in with other people on Earth once a week or so. But far too many of them were in the US, in Europe, in Israel, in Japan and South Korea, places where communications infrastructure was pretty much presupposed. People who should’ve been able to keep in touch, even if they weren’t able to go in to their offices at the various universities and other research institutions where they worked.
Ursula tried not to worry about them, reminding herself that there was nothing she could do on their behalf — even trying to contact their local police departments for a welfare check was an iffy proposition when law enforcement agencies had more important things to do than allay the fears of a colleague in a distant city. But it still concerned her, especially given that several of them were older, even in frail health.
But she was still glad to be back in her office, to pull up the latest data and look through it. Most of it was just more of the usual, but as she was looking at the magnetic field data, she noticed a number of anomalies.
Either we’ve got a problem with our sensors, or we’re looking at a serious new development. Time to get as many eyes looking at it as possible.
As soon as she’d set up a mailing to send the relevant segment of the data to the people best able to deal with it — more complete datasets could be put on hard drives and sent down via the lunar ferry — she retrieved her phone to text Tanner. Even if the situation was still uncertain, it was best if he and the other pilots were aware that changeable space weather was on its way.