Dr. Doorne wasn’t surprised to see Spruance Del Curtin in her office so early. He’d been doing it ever since things fell behind when they were dealing with the breakdown of the main board at Shepardsport Pirate Radio.
However, today he seemed oddly subdued, yet at the same time unusually intense — like he were really excited about something, but didn’t want to show it to all and sundry. Given he was a Shep, that could mean any of a dozen things, some good, others not so good. If he were cooking up a gotcha, she could only hope that he’d unleash it somewhere else, and it wouldn’t be too obnoxious.
On the other hand, if he’d suddenly caught fire on some project, that could be quite good. The kid was smart — anyone could see it — but he was most definitely not in any danger of becoming a people pleaser.
However, now was probably not the time to go looking over his shoulder. From what she could see, it looked as if he was hard at work on the latest group of data sets. Eventually he was going to need to be moved to more involved statistical analysis activities, because it was only a matter of time before he got bored with this level of work. But at the moment it was still a challenge to him.
Later she’d check the logs on that computer to make sure he wasn’t using its higher level of access to look at materials that weren’t generally available. Right now she had work of her own, and she needed to get onto it.
She went onto her computer expecting the usual stuff: notifications from IT on various jobs she’d sent to their heavy iron, alerts on pre-prints and various astronomical shop talk, the sort of thing earlier generations of scientists had to go to conferences to hear. But not an alert that Israel’s latest Mercury probe was picking up anomalous behavior on the other side of the Sun, where it couldn’t be observed from the Earth-Moon system.
And wouldn’t you know, Mars isn’t in the right position to get good observations either, not to mention their being twice as far out as we are.
The probe was there to do basic science, not space weather observation and forecasting, so it wouldn’t be able to provide near the level of detail as the system of satellites that monitored space weather in the Earth-Moon system. But it was closer in, which meant that its smaller sensors could pick up signals that would require a much larger sensor out here. On the other hand, everything it transmitted had to be relayed through another satellite.
And all anyone knew right now was that the data did not follow the expected patterns. Which meant it could be anything from an instrument malfunction to something that was going to change everyone’s understanding of how the Sun — and by extension, similar stars — function.
Right now, the first thing to do was take a good look at the data and make sure it wasn’t faulty. Right about the time she was doing her graduate work in astronomy, there’d been a number of very prestigious papers withdrawn when it was discovered that there was a problem with one of the early orbiting X-ray observatories. Yes, several of them were revised and resubmitted once the issues with its sensor suite were corrected, but it had been a huge amount of egg on the faces of some very senior scientists.
If it was a faulty sensor, the sooner it was caught, the better. Faulty data was worse than none at all. And if it wasn’t a fault in the sensor, everybody had better get cracking on understanding what it meant. Because if it was as anomalous as it looked, a huge chunk of space weather was no longer “in the family,” and space operations all over the Solar System could be in grave danger.