Cold War - Jerome Preisler [53]
“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.”
One million miles from Earth
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