Tag: Ursula Doorne

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Hard Data

Medlab was quiet this early in the morning, which made Barbie Thuc’s office all the better for a private conversation. And from what Ursula Doorne had said, it sounded like this was not something that either of them would want to get overheard.

The radio astronomer arrived as requested, through the employee and supplies entrance rather than the check-in entrance. Right now it was just as well to keep this meeting as quiet as possible. They’d had enough trouble with rumors circulating around the settlement already, and didn’t need any more of them.

“I’ve brought a copy of the latest data.” She held up a USB stick with an unremarkable blue plastic body. “This way you can go over it yourself.”

They ended up linking Ursula’s laptop with the big monitor that got a lot more use looking at X-rays and other medical imaging. When you were looking at a lot of data and the analysis of it, larger images were almost always better.

On the other hand, she wasn’t sure exactly how well positive words like “better” fit the data they were looking at. Even from what little information she could get via official channels, she knew that the situation at Schirrasburg was bad. But now that she was seeing the numbers, she had to fight down a surge of anger that NASA and HHR had suppressed the information to the point even senior medical personnel were unable to obtain it.

“I should not have had to get this by back-channel methods, and neither should my opposite numbers at Grissom City or Coopersville or any of the other settlements up here. If we’d been appraised of the situation from the beginning, we would’ve had that much more time to prepare. Instead, we’re going to be running to catch up.”

“You’re telling me.” Yes, Ursula Doorne was holding back a considerable amount of anger herself. “I only knew what to look for because my husband is a pilot-astronaut and knows some people over there. He’s the one who first told me how bad it was, although he just had general figures, not hard data like this.” She gestured at the charts and graphs that now covered the huge monitor, the columns of numbers on her laptop.

“And now the only thing we can do is prepare as best we can. We’ve got the advantage of a compartmentalized structure that makes isolation much easier, even if we can’t keep it out altogether. But I’m wondering how bad things are going to get on Earth. If they end up losing such a high proportion of their population, can technological society even survive?

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Troubling Conclusions

Over the years, Ursula Doorne had done a lot of work with statistics. Modern radio astronomy was just too heavily dependent upon statistical analysis of massive amounts of data for a professional astronomer to not master that subject. And since she’d come up here to the Moon, she’d been involved in analyzing data on projects very far afield from her actual specialties.

However, she’d never looked at any data as disturbing as what had just come in from Schirrasburg’s Medlab. What Tanner had told her was scuttlebutt, rumint, hearsay. But the numbers scrolling across the screen before her were the course of illness for one after another human being.

No, she was not going to have Spruance Del Curtin sanitize this data for analysis. That kid was just too damned perceptive, and he had the Shepard attitude about working the system.

What really worried her was the simple fact that this was not a random selection of people from a general population, as data from a dirtside hospital would’ve been. You didn’t get up here unless you were fit and healthy, and the mandatory exercise ensured you maintained your fitness. That meant she was working with a much higher health baseline than any data coming from Earth.

The typical epidemic hit hardest among the most vulnerable populations: the very young, the very old, those with pre-existing conditions, and those whose lives were in perpetual disarray. And in the early days of the diablovirus pandemic, anecdotal evidence would seem to have borne that out. She still remembered the human-interest spots on various news stations’ websites about it sweeping through homeless camps, the desperate searches for next-of-kin for deceased who often had only the most tenuous ties to society. And of course the nursing homes — she’d gotten some letters from home about various elderly relatives falling ill, being taken to the hospital, not making it.

In fact, she had gotten an impression that the diablovirus had cut a pretty clean swathe through those parts of the dirtside population Rather like those early villages up in the mountains of Asia, where travelers were reporting nothing but corpses in the houses, and domestic animals wandering the streets and fields.

But a healthy population, mostly in the late-twenties to early-fifties demographics, should not be showing the patterns of deaths and serious illnesses she was seeing — unless the disease itself was one of those statistical outliers that somehow combined high communicability with severe symptoms. Ursula wasn’t by any means an expert on infectuous diseases, but as she understood things, the higher the communicability, the less severe an illness tended to be, for the simple reason that if the disease hit people hard, they didn’t move around as much and spread the disease as far.

Which did not bode well for the other lunar settlements. A single breach of quarantine, a careless moment, could spell disaster.

And she knew as well as anyone that astronauts were still human beings, with the same basic needs and drives as everyone else. Which made it all the more likely that someone, somewhere, would commit just a little rules breach, and it would be just enough.

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Hints

Spruance Del Curtin had not intended to spy on Dr. Doorne’s communications. In fact, he was planning to just slip in and get some extra work done, and maybe get ahead of the game for a change.

But this batch of data was more boring than usual, and the longer he worked at it, the more his mind began to wander. Nearby voices became more interesting than the rows and columns on the screen in front of him.

Something about sigmoid functions and limits to growth. Dr. Doorne had talked about sigmoid functions in class a couple of sessions ago, and had used several examples, including one from biology, of a new species colonizing a new habitat its population and initially showing an exponential growth curve before hitting the limits of the environment and leveling off to a stable population.

Except that didn’t sound like what she was talking about now. For that matter, it didn’t exactly sound like she was talking to one of her students. No, that sounded more like she was talking to someone closer to her own level.

Even as he wondered just what she was talking about, he realized he was listening in on a conversation in which he had no part. A major breach of courtesy, although as long as he wasn’t obvious about it, calling attention to it would be an equally grave matter.

Which meant that if he wanted to find out what she was talking about, he would have to be extremely discreet about it. Which was not easy when he had only caught part of her conversation, and didn’t have a whole lot of context to work with.

In the meantime, he’d better get his mind back on the work that he was supposed to be doing. The last thing he needed right now was for her to walk in and find him clearly not paying attention to his work.

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Devastation

Ursula Doorne had just gotten her son tucked into bed and was getting ready to turn in for the night when the phone rang. Not wanting to have Rusty coming running out to see what was going on, she answered on the first ring, not even looking at the Caller ID.

As it turned out, it was Tanner. Beyond the initial ‘hi,” he didn’t even bother with opening pleasantries, just launched straight into what he had to say. “Ursey baby, I’ve got some stuff to tell you, but don’t go spreading it around.”

“Understood. Strict information embargo until you say otherwise.”

“Good, because I can get in a hell of a lot of trouble if this gets around and they think I’m spreading it. Things are finally turning around at Schirrasburg, and it’s not a good situation. Yes, the guy did have the diablovirus, and we were damned lucky they discovered it before anyone else left and spread it to the whole lunar population. As it was, it pretty much went through the entire settlement. Maybe a tenth of the population is naturally immune, and another tenth were able to throw it off with mild symptoms.”

Ursula wasn’t an epidemiologist, but numbers and statistical analysis were such an important part of modern astronomy that she had some familiarity with their use in a wide variety of fields. As her husband gave her percentages for various severe forms and complications, she realized this was way out of the ordinary, even for a virgin-field epidemic.

“Of course we have to consider that a lot of the dead may well have been saved if they’d been in a location with a larger medical facility. From what I’ve heard, a number of people died because certain medical resources simply ran out before they became ill.”

“Understood.” Ursula was aware of the protocols for dealing with such situations. Harsh as they might seem to people accustomed to large Earthside medical centers, they had been carefully developed to ensure that resources would be allocated responsibly and ethically. “So what did finally stop it?”

“Basically, it just ran out of susceptible people to infect. Although that’s a hell of a way to put a stop to a pandemic on a global scale.”

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The Time We Lose to Meetings

One of the things Ursula Doorne really liked about her peculiar status was how it got her out of a lot of the administrative foofaw that plagued academic departments. With her background in electrical engineering, she was far too valuable dealing with equipment that needed repaired to have her serving on this or that committee, sitting through meetings, filling out documents, and the like.

Except there were always some meetings that one simply couldn’t duck out of, no matter how valuable one was in other areas. Like today, when the head of Science had ordered her to deliver a report on the peculiar behavior of the Sun.

Which meant that she had to pull together all the figures on almost no notice, when she still had very incomplete data. But from the sound of Dr. Iwe’s request, someone higher up wanted to see answers.

Which raised the question of just who was doing the asking. From everything she’d heard, including what Tanner had told her, she was under the impression that NASA was operating on a skeleton crew, just enough to keep essential operations going.

But any anomalies in the behavior of the Sun are essential information, she reminded herself as she completed the last slide for her A/V presentation. Of course NASA is going to want to know about it.

The door to her office opened. Surprised, she looked up at Spruance Del Curtin. “You’re early today.”

“Thought I’d get an early start on the latest data sets.”

“Right now I don’t have any ready.” She explained about the sudden call to make a presentation at the Science Division committee meeting.

Yes, Sprue actually did look disappointed. Could that cocky young smartass actually be discovering actual pride in work that essential but not showy?

Maybe she ought to bring him under her wing a little more, mentor some of that talent that was so often hidden under that I’m-too-cool-for-this exterior. “However, you can help me with the presentation, and get to see a little more of how science gets done.”

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Our Inconstant Sun

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.

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Other Means of Validating Data

When Ursula Doorne first started advanced studies in astronomy, digital imaging technologies were really starting to come into their own in optical astronomy. Although she’d already specialized in radio astronomy, she had to work with the optical astronomers on a regular basis, and a lot of them were still very much of the glass photographic plate school. To them, there was no way a microchip could possibly compare with silver halide emulsion in capturing images.

By that time she already had enough background in electrical engineering to have a grasp of all the benefits of digital imaging. However, most of the most adamant members of the faculty were also very senior, and not exactly someone a student wanted to get crosswise with. Although given her specialty, it was unlikely they would be on her committee, there were other ways for someone of their stature to ruin a career before it even got started.

So she’d kept her head down and avoided them as much as possible. Which was probably why she’d spent almost as much time with the electrical engineering people as even the radio astronomers. At least there she didn’t have to watch her step quite so much, because the EE people weren’t going to be talking over coffee with the very people who most irritated her.

And that was probably why she often felt as comfortable down here in IT as she did in the Astronomy department offices. Especially when she needed to talk signals processing and data, these were her people. Of course Steffi Roderick was more of an AI specialist, but given how data-driven most AI was, especially when it involved autonomous robots like deep-space probes, she had a solid grounding in ways to deal with suspect data.

“We can certainly take a look at it. Just having more eyes looking at data helps catch anything that’s out of kilter. But there are a few things we can do that would be able to catch some of the less common instrumentation errors. Not perfect, but better than nothing while we’re waiting to get something else in position. By the way, you haven’t released any of this?”

“Only to the space weather people, as a precaution, and with a very clear caveat that it is not for general distribution. If we’re majorly wrong about some aspect of the Sun’s function, they need to know so they can adjust their forecasting accordingly.”

“That’s good to know. If we do find evidence of errors, it’s much easier if we don’t have to worry about retracting any pre-prints or poster sessions.”

“Don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten the AXIL fiasco.” Ursula paused, looked directly at Steffi. “Were you at JPL yet when that happened?”

“No, I was still finishing up my degree, but we heard about it. One of my professors discussed the sensor issues in class, since he had been one of the designers of the AXIL sensor system. Interesting days.”

“Yes, interesting days indeed.”

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Check Your Data

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.

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It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over

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.

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Catching Up

Now that Ken Redmond had given up on fixing the main board for Shepardsport Pirate Radio and was having his electrical people rebuild it from the ground up, Spruance Del Curtin had some time again. Except he also had a bunch of catching up to do because of the time he’d lost.

The biggest problem was all that data for Dr. Doorne. This was something he couldn’t skate through, or make look done. Every data set needed individual attention, and it all had to be right. Let something slip through, and the heavy iron down at IT might well choke on it — especially if it was a malformed argument, or data incorrectly recorded so that it looked like a command. Of course everything was done on copies, not the original data, but it still wasted time on some of the most powerful — and expensive — computers up here.

So Sprue had decided to come up here early and get started just as soon as he could get into the Astronomy department. It meant having his breakfast sent up here, and he couldn’t hang out with the guys or hit on girls, but at least he was making reasonable headway on clearing the backlog. And even if his scrambled eggs were cold, he could reheat them in the department microwave.

But he was making good headway on the backlog, to the point the end was in sight. Not just the light at the end of the tunnel, which might be an oncoming train, but actually getting the last of those datasets ready for the next step in processing. With a little luck, he might well have them done before he needed to head off for his teaching responsibility.

He was so focused on his work that he almost didn’t notice Dr. Doorne coming into the office, never mind that she was talking on the phone to someone. At least she wasn’t one of those people who considered it an important courtesy for student assistants to rise and greet her when she entered the room. But then she was from somewhere out West — not California, maybe Arizona or Nevada? — and had a laid-back attitude about those kinds of formalities.

On the other hand, he was just as glad he didn’t have to interrupt her phone conversation by formally greeting her. Talk about a double-bind…

Better to just keep busy with the data. Although it was hard not to overhear tantalizing bits and pieces of halfalogue. Something about being in grade school “then,” and about always being ready to help, but not sure how useful something would be right now. Whatever it was, it sounded like it might be interesting, or it might be unutterably boring, depending on what the other person wanted.

Not that it mattered, since he wasn’t part of the conversation, and by lunar social conventions, he wasn’t even supposed to acknowledge the existence of the conversation in his presence. In any case, Dr. Doorne was winding it up.

“Good morning, Mr. Del Curtin.” Was that use of formal address a warning that she was aware he was listening in, even just a little bit? “You’re certainly here early.”

“There was a lot to catch up.” Sprue gestured toward the data on the monitor. “Especially since we’re going to have some extra work down at the station once the rebuilt main board is ready to go in, I wanted to get on top of it.”

“That’s a good idea, because we’ve got a new batch of data coming in, and I’m going to have you heading up a team three other student assistants.”

Wow, that sounds big. Sprue hoped his face didn’t betray his astonishment at so much responsibility, so fast. He was a Shep, and it was important to maintain that Shep cool. “Thanks, Dr. Doorne. I’m glad you have confidence in me.”