Tag: Ursula Doorne

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.