The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [73]
Van sensed that this demonstration was his last chance. “Like I said, about that space dust,” he said. “I’ve got a friend in Los Alamos National Lab who models particle action in dielectric fields.”
“You seem to have a whole lot of unnamed friends, Dr. Vandeveer.”
Van’s temper sharpened. “General, in the President’s National Security Council, we don’t exactly lack for helpful contacts.”
Wessler heaved aside a stack of folders on his desk to make extra room for Van’s box. “Please. Do help yourself.”
Van took a deep breath. “Ionized dust seeks equilibrium, to balance that electric charge. So the dust will settle wherever the fields on the spacecraft guide it.” Van removed an extremely secret printout from the case. He ran his finger across the schematics. “That means you’re getting a cloud of filth on the KH-13’s sensor booms, the edges of the chassis, and especially right about here. This highly charged area, just at the rim of the Mylar insulation. There’s a big component there, under the skin of the hull. It’s an MIL-STD-1541, Taiwanese capacitor. Just like this component in this case.”
Wessler gazed into the box. “Where did you get that thing?”
“They’re pretty standard. My secretary bought it off eBay.” Van sighed. “Ideally, I would have liked three milspec control-CDUs in this experiment as well, but that is way beyond my salary.” Van touched a switch. “Okay, General, I think we’re ready to roll now. I want you to watch this voltmeter here. Mike, fire the model up.”
Hickok put his hand to a gray plastic crank. There was a faint crackle.
“See that needle bouncing?” Van said. “Now look at these SEU records. Bang, bang, beat, beat, blip. Same series, same surges, same rates of decline. That’s it, General. This is your bug, that’s your ongoing operational anomaly. It’s a hardware glitch, and it’s in this capacitor. It’s got so much dirt on top of it that it is overheating.”
“You’re telling me there’s too much dirt on it,” Wessler said. “But you can’t tell me why there is any dust in the first place.”
“No, sir, I can’t tell you that. But I can tell you how to fix it. You need to spin the spacecraft.”
“Spin it,” said Wessler.
“Spin it on the longitudinal axis. That’ll fling the loose dust off, and whenever these, uh, episodes happen again . . . well, spinning will spread the stresses evenly across the whole spacecraft. So you won’t get that pitting, that, uhm, that sputtering . . .” Van was losing it. Those words he’d just said, “ongoing operational anomaly.” That was a regular tongue twister. “You tell him, Mike.”
“The bird spins like a chicken on a spit, sir. Won’t blacken all on one side, turns golden brown, like.”
“But the whole point of a satellite is to have a steady, fixed camera!”
“No,” said Van. “The whole point is steady, fixed images. You can compute the fixed images from a spinning satellite camera.”
“That’s impossible.”
“No. It can be done.” Astronomers could help a lot with orbiting camera images. Van hadn’t breathed a word to Dottie about it, but he knew it could be made to happen.
“It’s like Hollywood special effects, sir,” said Hickok proudly. “We’ll just fix it up in post-production. Like Jurassic Park!”
Wessler rose from his desk and put both his hands in his blue jumpsuit pockets. He had the look of a man who badly needed a drink.
“You will lose two, three percent of acuity if you spin the camera,” Van admitted. “But you’ve already lost that much acuity to that so-called CCD fogging. That is not a CCD problem at all, by the way. That is dirt being blasted off your spacecraft and settling on your lens.”
Wessler was still pacing. “We don’t have the fuel to spin that bird. We’re not made out of hydrazine up there.”
“That’s right. You’ll also lose fifteen months off the expected nine-year life. But at that rate of damage . . . the satellite won’t live two years.”
“Our bird is under attack!” said Hickok, passionately jumping to his feet. “There is something up there,