How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [50]
“You never move,” he said.
“My fingers move.”
In fact, my fingers moved a lot. I had thoroughly rewritten all of the computer software. Chad had written the first version without the benefit of having any of the data at the time. With the luxury of data, I could rewrite it to work better, run faster, search farther, and see fainter objects. I was ready. I started spending my days not just looking at the new pictures coming from the telescope the night before but also scanning the thousands of pictures that I had stored on the disk drives of my computer.
Someone watching over my shoulder that summer would have seen an incredibly monotonous sight: Mike presses a button; a new series of images begins blinking on his screen; he stares for three seconds; he presses a button marked “no”; new images appear.
I did this for hours a day. My posture got even worse. My back ached. But I was discovering things in the old pictures. The first time around, we had missed a lot. This time, I didn’t want to miss anything.
I think of this period in the fall of 2004 as one of the most fertile in my life. Still, though, there were no planets, and I was losing my bet. I was working longer hours, sleeping less, all in the hope of getting through all of the data before the end of the year. I really did not want to lose the bet. If there was something to be found in the old pictures, there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that would stop me from finding it. Well, almost nothing.
At the beginning of December, taking a rare break from looking at my old pictures, someone else showed me a picture of something I had never seen before. The moment I saw it, my mind flashed back to images I remembered having seen in high school. In 1982, a Russian Venera spacecraft sent back the first—and still only—color pictures from the surface of Venus. Venus is a tough place to take pictures from. The surface has an atmospheric pressure ninety times higher than the earth’s and a temperature of more than eight hundred degrees, which would melt the lens of any camera. The Russians therefore built the camera inside a giant can to keep the extreme pressures and heat out as long as they could. To see Venus, a periscope popped out of the can and scanned around. Even so, the whole contraption lasted only two hours before it died.
The pictures that the Russians sent back from Venus have a peculiar characteristic to them. Because of the periscope, they are oddly distorted, as if they had been taken by a fish-eye lens. Because of the thick clouds of sulfuric acid that cover Venus, among other things, the color pictures have an oddish orange glow and appear almost to be black and white. They are hard to mistake for almost anything else.
I had been spending most of my time those past few months staring at a huge computer screen hoping to be the first person ever to see a new big thing moving through the distant regions of space. That morning, I stared at a smaller screen and examined a black-and-white image with an orange tint to it and an oddly distorted view like that through a fish-eye lens. It wasn’t Venus. In the middle of the oddly distorted view was a little bean-sized object. Looking at the sonogram, Diane and I, along with our doctor, were the first people to see the tiny movements of a little heart beating.
“Hey!” I said. “It looks like the Venera lander pictures of the surface of Venus.”
“You’re insane,” Diane said.
We told our families on New Year’s Eve. Mine were visiting from Alabama. Diane’s lived in town. Everyone sat down to dinner.
I began: “Before dinner, I’d like to make an announcement.”
I had been saying this at every family dinner since Diane and I had been married. I usually then proceeded to say, “It’s time to eat.” People who are regulars at our dinners barely look up while awaiting the now-tedious punch line.
My family, however, had never heard the joke. They gasped slightly. Diane’s father quickly interjected, “He says this every time, just ignore him.”
Everyone calmed down