The last three hours had given Ursula Doorne a massive headache, and she wasn’t exactly prone to them. But this work had most definitely given her one, and she really didn’t want to have to call over to Medlab and have them send a deliverybot with painkillers to her office.
Going over the data itself wasn’t that hard — but right now she did not view it as a useful process, not until she had verified that the methods used to collect it were indeed valid. And that was what was proving the most difficult problem.
With all the various satellites and scientific probes humanity had put into space in the decades since Sputnik, one would think almost any location in the inner Solar System would be covered by at two or more sets of sensors. That it would be reasonably easy to get another set of sensors trained onto a phenomenon of interest, if nothing else, just to make sure that it wasn’t an artifact of a subtly faulty sensor. Surely no one wanted a repeat of the AXIL fiasco, which had derailed several promising careers in X-ray astronomy.
But no, there was not one probe anywhere that could be trained on that one region near the Sun’s south pole that seemed to be behaving oddly. Right now the Israeli probe at Mercury was their only source of data, and given that the solar data was incidental to its actual mission, there was a very real question that they might be looking at faulty data.
Ursula closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose, trying to ease the pounding within her head. What other resources could they bring to bear to get another source of data without waiting for the Sun’s polar regions to come around to where the vast number of systems in the Earth-Moon system could get a good look at it?
In the meantime, she’d better talk to the space weather people. At least give them the heads-up about the data she was looking at. Make sure they understood this was not in any way, shape or form a formal release of information, not even a pre-print, but she wanted them to be aware that the space weather situation could change at a moment’s notice if it represented a major gap in the astronomy upon which their work was based.