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Dr. Janet Garb headed towards her evening Astronomy 101 laboratory session at the off-campus observatory in a mountainous section of Arizona. This is what most professional astronomy had degraded to over the last decade: teaching introductory astronomy to a mere handful of kids that usually squeezed the course into their schedules as a mere afterthought.
Still, with the disappearance of most Federal Government funding for basic research, Janet knew that she was lucky to be employed in her profession at all. When she did have time for research, at least there was plenty of under-utilized equipment at the observatory that she could apply. She couldn't imagine how the University could keep funding the observatory, but they did. There were rumors of significant private funding by an undisclosed source; perhaps those rumors were true. Maintenance was a bitch though; keeping the huge facility going had become basically a do-it-yourself proposition.
Thankfully, some of her students were truly interested in astronomy, even if it wasn't considered practical or politically correct to bother with understanding things beyond the Earth's ecosphere. Even more than her own research opportunities, those few, well-motivated kids made her job bearable.
The underpowered, ecologically-correct auto she drove crept slowly up the Arizona mountainside. She anxiously checked her fuel gages again, and breathed a sigh of relief. It looked like her emergency hydrogen fuel cell would indeed get her as far as the observatory, where she could get both her primary and emergency fuel cells recharged. She cursed herself again for forgetting to reset her auto's solar/hydrogen fuel cell charging system to 'automatic' that morning. The Arizona sunlight would have at least partly recharged her primary hydrogen fuel cell, even in December, but yesterday she forgot to refill her water fuel tank, so she had switched off the automatic recharge-mode. Then today she remembered the water but forgot to turn the recharge-mode back on!
She recalled when driving a car was a much simpler proposition: you simply gassed-up and drove until you had to gas-up again. Morally, she was totally in favor of the efforts being made to preserve what little remained of the Earth's hydrocarbon fuels for future generations, but at times it led to bothersome inconveniences. She was certainly relieved that this time she wouldn't suffer the inconvenience of being stranded in remote Arizona desert country!
Arriving at last at the observatory, Dr. Garb was pleased to find that her lab students had already arrived, as evidenced by Tom Whitman's auto in the parking lot. Tom must surely have also brought the other two students of the class, Mary and Ellen. In fact, she was fairly certain that Mary was the only reason that Tom had signed up for this course. Mary signed up for it because she needed a science elective; any science elective. But Ellen was truly interested in astronomy. Bright and energetic, she would have made an excellent astronomy major, if such a thing were still possible at their University.
Inside, she wasn't surprised to see Ellen already at the manual controls of the 40 inch reflecting telescope. Also, she wasn't surprised to not see Tom or Mary. There had been other late night lab sessions in which those two obviously had experiments in mind other than astronomy. They were probably off together now in some secluded part of the observatory, enthusiastically exchanging bodily fluids. That wouldn’t help their grades, but Dr. Garb decided not to make a big issue of it; she was their teacher, not their baby sitter. They were both over 18, and she still remembered vividly when she was herself a young coed in love.
She spoke to Ellen in a loud voice to give Tom and Mary a chance to produce themselves. "So, what's new in the cosmos tonight Ellen?" she asked, as she approached her prize student.
Ellen looked up from the eyepiece. She looked perplexed and frustrated, which was very unusual for Ellen. "Professor Garb, I just don't understand what I'm doing wrong. I've just concluded that I'm looking at a CTAO object that isn't where it's supposed to be."
CTAO stood for Centrally Tracked Astronomical Objects. The international computer net of CTAO capable facilities was a repository for astronomical observations that also disseminated information on the current expected positions for hundreds of thousands of astronomical objects. This was particularly useful for dynamic objects such as those comprising the local Solar System. The observatory tracking computers hosted a local CTAO software node-package that interfaced with both the local observatory software and with the rest of the world's CTAO systems via the VISICOM optical fiber network. You simply activated your observatory tracking computer with its CTAO package, picked any of the thousands of objects in the CTAO data base, and your telescope would automatically track the object.
The locally resident CTAO software even annotated the telescope viewing screen with pertinent measurement data that could subsequently be fed back to the CTAO system, so that new measurements could continue to refine the CTAO data base. There had been minor glitches, to be sure, but Dr. Garb, her students, and other astronomers world-wide were generally very pleased with CTAO.
"What object are you talking about?" asked Dr. Garb, as she turned to look at the telescope's digitally enhanced optical image, which was being projected onto the huge video screen. "Dannos 197," replied Ellen. Sure enough, a familiar looking, tumbling, irregular, rock-like object was evident in the center of the computer-enhanced video screen. Still a couple hundred million miles away, Dannos was due to pass within about 200,000 miles of Earth, just slightly within the Moon's orbit, in a little more than ten days, early on the morning of December 25. Though this would still be far away in terms of terrestrial scales of measure, it would be a very near miss in astrological terms. In fact, there was a lot of publicity associated with the event. A national news network was even planning to begin live VISICOM broadcasts of Dannos from this very observatory next week, to provide the public with nightly observations until Christmas on Friday.
Dr. Garb quickly checked the consistency of the information on the viewing screen. Separate windows to the right of screen center displayed Sun-centric and Earth centric views of CTAO projected paths for Dannos 197, compared with the latest actual observations made world-wide that helped project the paths. Everything agreed perfectly, just as it had on the several other occasions that she had viewed Dannos over the last few weeks. It was all evident on the video screen. Thousands of world-wide observations coincided perfectly with the projected path. A bright red line and dot indicated that their current telescope line-of-sight coincided perfectly with the current CTAO expected position, as indicated by a green circle. The covariance matrix that indicated tracking position uncertainty was tiny. Hundreds of CTAO users had for months been viewing Dannos and refining the tracking solution.
So what could Ellen be talking about? "I don't see any discrepancies, Ellen," she said.
Ellen looked up from the eyepiece she was using to view Dannos directly, and looked at the huge video screen. Maybe because she was a beginner or a purist or both, Ellen seldom yet used the big screen. She preferred to actually see the raw optical image, composed of light that had actually traveled across the cosmos, not a computer enhanced blowup of that raw image. She looked at the screen, and then at a piece of paper on which she had scribbled notes. "But that's the problem," she said, pointing at the screen "Dannos isn't where CTAO says it is."
"OK, Ellen," said Garb, with a sigh. "Why don't you explain exactly how you have come to that conclusion?” Ellen was such a good student that Garb sometimes forgot that she was still after all an amateur. She must have made some careless mistake. Unusual for Ellen, but everyone makes mistakes.
"Well," began Ellen, "first I made sure that Little Bob was calibrated.” Little Bob was the pet name long used by everyone for the 40 inch reflecting telescope, by far the smallest of the three observatory scopes. Rumor had it that years ago the telescope was named after a certain male student named Bob who had acquired a reputation on campus for an unfortunate anatomical shortcoming.
As Ellen spoke, she again activated the tracking computer calibration function. Apparently, Ellen wa
s repeating the precise process she had used. “Good,” thought Dr. Garb, “I should be able to resolve where she made her error.” In seconds, the calibration function confirmed that the frame of reference of the telescope was correct. Of course this was to be expected, since the telescope was evidently able to correctly point at and track Dannos.
"Next," continued Ellen, "I requested numerical coordinates for Dannos from CTAO at the terminal.” This she also did again as she spoke. The answer, which coincided with the reading on the big screen, appeared almost immediately on the observatory small control terminal screen. "Then," continued Ellen, moving back to the off-line telescope observation station, "I entered the coordinates into Bob manually, like this, and instead of using CTAO I let the observatory computer point Bob using those coordinates.”
Now controlled 'off line' from CTAO, the CTAO read-outs disappeared, and the screen blurred momentarily as the telescope obviously moved very slightly. "But there is no Dannos there!” Displayed on the big screen were exactly the same coordinates that CTAO had given for Dannos. But the small tumbling shape of Dannos was gone! There were only background stars and galaxies.
Dr. Garb blinked, but the Dannos-less view remained there on the big screen. Then she looked through the optical eyepiece. No Dannos. She checked computer readouts and back-up telescope position registers. Everything checked-out. What the hell was going on? Earth motion? No, she saw that the observatory computer was properly compensating for that, even without CTAO's help.
After pausing to give Dr. Garb a chance to convince herself that there was indeed some sort of problem, Ellen continued. "Next, I asked CTAO to point Bob at Dannos.” As she spoke she efficiently called up the appropriate CTAO function and entered Dannos 197. Again the big screen blurred momentarily as the telescope obviously moved very slightly. On the big screen, Dannos appeared again, along with the other CTAO generated information. Again, CTAO displayed coordinate read-outs agreed with the values that moments before, when applied off-line from CTAO, had resulted in no view of Dannos! ”Finally," concluded Ellen, "I recorded the non- CTAO telescope position read outs.” She looked at Bob's manual read-out registers, wrote down the coordinates, and handed the piece of paper to Dr. Garb. The coordinates were different from those displayed by the CTAO system!
Dr. Garb was dumbfounded. The CTAO system, since it was instituted at least seven years ago, had been tested and re-tested by thousands of users world-wide. These discrepancies simply had to be some weird problem with Little Bob or some other observatory system. But how could that be? The observatory system had recently been performing flawlessly for her and her colleagues. Besides, how could the CTAO aided system find Dannos at all if it was screwed up?
Over the next hour she and Ellen re-performed variations of the experiment several times, with the same disturbing results.
They were so engrossed in the work that they barely acknowledged Mary and Tom when they finally appeared. Dr. Garb told the couple that class was called off because of equipment problems, and sent them home without Ellen. Ellen VISICOMed her roommate at the dorm to tell her that she would be home even later than usual. Janet Garb had nobody to phone; not since the twins went off to college last year. She had divorced her husband two years before that. Especially since those events, it was not unusual for her to spend long nights alone at the Observatory.
Dr. Garb and her young assistant worked through the night. They checked and rechecked calibration by performing observations of well-known objects. They ran diagnostic checks of observatory systems. They re-performed the experiment using 60 inch (John) and 100 inch (Big John) optical telescopes. They compared positions of Dannos with those of background objects. The results were always the same. Gradually, even a skeptical Dr. Garb became certain that Ellen had been right in the first place.
Their observations were correct; CTAO was wrong!
At 4 AM they entered all their own observations into the observatory system and recalculated Dannos' true trajectory off-line from CTAO. Taken by themselves, the observations they made this night were over too short a time/distance baseline to determine an accurate trajectory. Fortunately, she had raw data records of several observatory system measurements that she had made months and years ago that she could now correct and apply.
The results were horrifying. "Well Ellen," she said, "the good news is, I'm giving you an A+ for this course. The bad news is, after December 25th, there probably won't be a course. Or a University. Or life on this planet."
The newly calculated trajectory predicted with great accuracy that Dannos would collide with Earth early on Christmas morning! Despite this terrifying result, the two shocked astronomers were by then too physically and emotionally drained for the enormity of the results to fully 'sink in'. As they sat staring at the projected trajectory on the big screen, need for sleep was at last overcoming them.
There was still one more thing to do, however. Janet Garb sent VISICOM messages to several of her fellow astronomers around the world, and entered the new trajectory for Dannos into the CTAO system as a new track. Within hours she felt, all hell would break loose. She also sent a message to the University to cancel her classes for a few days. She planned on working in the observatory, sleeping, drinking, or rounding up her kids so that she could be with them, but not teaching, though right now she was far too tired to figure out exactly which alternative(s) she would actually be doing.
At least now she could finally drive herself and Ellen home. Turning to Ellen, she saw that the petite girl was comfortably sound asleep at Little Bob's observation station. At that moment she remembered that in all the excitement she had forgotten to recharge her auto's hydrogen fuel cells, and that would now require an hour-long procedure using the observatory's old recharging system before they could leave.
"Oh, screw it," she thought. She couldn't stay awake an hour while the cells recharged, and she was too tired to drive down the mountain anyway. As she had often done in the recent past, she cuddled up in Big John's comfortable, reclining observation seat. She finally slept fitfully, with the image of dark, cold, massive Dannos, tumbling through space towards Earth with destructive power greater than a nuclear Armageddon still etched indelibly in her mind.
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