“Then whatever time it was for Scarborough’s group would’ve corresponded with the pilot’s.”
“Yes,” Megan said. “Russ was heading to Marble Point.” She gestured toward its position on the Dry Valleys map. “That’s a little refueling facility at the foot of the Wilson Piedmont Glacier, about fifty miles northwest of McMurdo. He’d made the first two stops of his shift, and thinks it was about seven A.M. when he saw our party.”
“And your best guess about how long they’d been out on foot…?”
“Two hours at most. The area they covered had some tedious rocky patches, but Scarborough would have left camp early.”
“Old military habit?”
She nodded. “He isn’t the type to waste a minute.”
Nimec contemplated that, peering at the map.
“They were just getting started,” he said.
“Yes.”
“What about after the pilot saw them that morning? They report in to Cold Corners at any point?”
Meg was shaking her head now.
“That would have been largely at their discretion. Of course we’d have expected to hear from them if they located the rover. Obviously if they needed assistance. But we never received a Mayday. It’s the part that drives me crazy, Pete… trying to understand why Scar wouldn’t have let us know he was in trouble.”
“Had me and the boss wondering too.” Nimec rubbed his chin. “Any chance I could talk to the pilot myself?”
“It should be easy to arrange. Russ drops by to help us often enough.”
Nimec nodded, pleased. He was still looking at the map.
“I assume the blue pin marks the spot where Scout’s transmissions zilched.”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s at the opposite end of the pass from our recovery team’s camp. A span of twelve miles.”
“How come they didn’t pitch their tents closer to it?”
“The only way into the valleys is by chopper, and landing one in Bull Pass is a dangerous proposition. It’s narrow in places, and winds are fickle. That leaves us having to choose between drop zones at McKelvey to the north and Wright to the south. And the approach from Wright Valley on foot is full of obstacles. There are ridges, hills, all kinds of steep elevations.”
Nimec was silent, thinking. Then he turned from the wall map to look at Megan.
“How soon can you have a helicopter ready so I can check out the area for myself?”
She faced him across the desk, a wan smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
“What’s on your mind?” he said.
“Pete, if anybody else had spoken those words, I’d be positive he was kidding. You arrived less than an hour ago. Get some food into your stomach. Rest up. Then we can start to talk about making plans.”
“I caught a few winks on the plane,” he said.
She pursed her lips. The smile did not quite leave them.
“How about we strike a compromise,” she said. “Grab a bite together in the cafeteria.”
“I’m not hungry—”
“Today’s special is a hot turkey breast sandwich on homemade club. You won’t believe our greenhouse tomatoes. And the coffee. We have a selection of lattes and mochas. Cappuccino too. And espresso. Also four or five blends of ordinary roast if your taste leans toward the pedestrian side.”
He looked at her.
“Lattes in Antarctica,” he said.
She nodded. “This is an UpLink base. Moreover, it’s my base. And despite these ghastly earth-mother clothes, I’m still Megan Breen.”
Nimec suddenly couldn’t help but crack a smile of his own.
“Okay, princess,” he said. “Let’s eat.”
The satellite glided through deep space like a solitary night bird, its keen electronic sensors picking up signs of the coming storm as they were swept toward it on the solar wind.
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory — or SOHO — was a joint space probe conceived by NASA and the European Space Agency in the 1990’s for gathering a wealth of scientific information about the sun and its atmospheric emissions. In early March 1996, fourteen months after its liftoff from Cape Canaveral aboard the upper stage of an Atlas IIAS (Atlas/Centaur) launch vehicle, the satellite was injected into a counterclockwise halo orbit around the sun at what is known as the L1 Lagrangian point — named after the eighteenth-century French astronomer Joseph-Louis Lagrange, who theorized there were calculable distances at which a small object in space could remain in fixed orbital positions between two larger bodies exerting strong gravitational pulls upon it.
The mathematical formulations must be precise. Should an object in the middle of this interplanetary tug of war wander from its position by more than a few degrees, the delicate equilibrium becomes upset and its orbit will rapidly degrade.
In SOHO’s case the L1 point equaled four times the distance from our world to the moon, with any significant deviation from that point certain to result in an uncontrolled plunge toward either the earth or sun. One complication the observatory’s development team had to address, however, was that their preferred orbital position for SOHO was slightly off the L1 point, since the radio interference that would occur when it was in direct line between the two opposing spheres was bound to corrupt its data transmissions with static. A second problem was that other bodies in the solar system — distant planets, moons, asteroids — had their own weaker attractions that could jiggle SOHO’s path a little bit this way or that to ultimately disastrous effect.
The team’s solution to both these problems was to equip SOHO with an onboard propulsion system for periodic orbital adjustments, knowing this imposed an inherent limitation on its mission life. For once it exhausted the hydrazine fuel that powered its thrusters, SOHO would slip from its desired Lagrangian station and go tumbling off through space beyond recovery.
Original projections were that the billion-dollar spacecraft would be able to conduct its observations and experiments for from two to five years before the propellent reserves went dry and its mission reached an end.
Six years later and counting, it was still plugging away.
Some things are still built to last, and every so often they last longer than expected.
In March 2002, SOHO’s SWAN and MDI/SOI instruments, two of a dozen scientific devices in its payload module, sniffed the astrophysical equivalent of what American prairie farmers once would have called a locust wind.
An acronym for Solar Wind Anisotropies, SWAN is an ultraviolet survey of the dispersed hydrogen cloud around our planetary system that can detect glowing hot spots in space caused by fluctuations of solar radiation. To the SWAN’s wide-angle eye, which charts the full sky around the sun three times each week, a surge in the emissions striking these areas will cause them to light up like flashes from warning beacons even if the surge originates beyond the sun’s visible face, outside the range of earthbound telescopes.
MDI/SOI — short for Michelson Doppler Imager/Solar Oscillations Investigation — is more direct in its approach, measuring wave motions that vibrate through the convective layer of the sun. Depending on their amplitude, deviations from the wavelengths commonly registered by MDI/ SOI can put scientists on the lookout for helioseismological events that are roughly analogous to earthquakes and may be indicators of impending solar flare activity.
Relayed to earth by its telemetry arrays in near-real time, SOHO’s information about the flurry of concurrent beacon flashes and solar tremors did not take long to create a stir of excitement in its command-and-control center in Maryland.
Two men in particular got the headline-making jump on the rest of the pack.