Over the past several days, the data had trickled in far more slowly than Ursula Doorne would’ve preferred. After talking to several people in flight ops whose grounding in orbital mechanics was much stronger than her own, she’d been forced to conclude that there just wasn’t any way to get better equipment on that part of the Sun before it would rotate into view of the far larger number of assets watching from the Earth-Moon system.
That made it particularly frustrating, since the solar poles rotated noticeably more slowly than the equatorial regions — thirty days as opposed to twenty-four. If the conditions the Israeli probe had reported were transitory, they could have completely returned to normal by the time that region of the Sun rotated into view.
Which is something a lot of people don’t understand — that the Sun, and by extension main sequence stars in general, don’t rotate as solid bodies. Back when I was still teaching intro astronomy classes, I always struggled to get that across to my students.
The thought made her try to recall when she’d last taught basic astronomy. Deena had been giving those classes to the junior members of the department, a lot of whom would be TA’s at any university back on Earth, while she was getting more and more classes that dealt with the mechanics of observation, like signals processing or statistical analysis.
Speaking of which, right now she simply didn’t have enough data to do any meaningful analysis. She’d seen far too many situations in which scientiests in any number of fields got over-excited about some results they’d gotten from too small of a data set and couldn’t wait to verify it with a larger data set before running out to go public. It might not be quite as embarrassing as the prospectors on Mars who thought they’d discovered a brick wall and thus evidence of indigenous intelligent life, only to have closer examination by actual geologists reveal that the “bricks” were actually naturally occuring cracks, similar to ones that had confused terrestrial explorers. But it was still embarrassing, especially for someone who didn’t have a fair number of solid monograph credits, and often made it harder to get tenure or grant money.
And in the case of this discovery, it would have immediate practical importance in space weather forecasting, and thus space operations. They could not afford to race to conclusions based upon data that might turn out to be faulty.
On the other hand, even if this were to have some profound effect on space weather in the next fifteen days, we should still have enough warning to get everyone under cover. And that’s assuming that something that close to the solar south pole would result in effects here in the Earth-Moon system.
But we still need to make it a priority to get more solar observation satellites into closer solar orbits, so we can monitor the entire Sun all the time.
Even as that thought crossed her mind, she realized that it might well be easier said than done. Like as not, they’d have far more immediate priorities for years to come than expanding their solar observation satellite network.