Moonbase Crisis: Star Challengers Book 1 (9 page)

Fifteen

After the meteor shower, the damage inspections, and the base-wide cleanup, King received his next assignment. Major Fox said, “You are to help Dr. Wu in any way possible. He probably won’t want your assistance, so you may have to find your own way to be useful.”

That didn’t sound promising. “I’ll figure it out, Major.”

King had always been interested in astronomy, but the bright city lights in his neighborhood made stargazing difficult.

Once he passed through the airlock into the warm observatory module, the resident astronomer—a thin and quiet middle-aged man—greeted him.

They fell into an awkward silence while King removed his suit.

Wu said. “I don’t really need much help. How did you say you got here again? Has the supply ship arrived yet? Or is that tomorrow?”

King didn’t want to try to answer the first question. “I’m here for whatever you need, Dr. Wu. I work hard, and I won’t disturb you.”

“I’m sure that’s true, young man.” Dr. Wu scratched the graying black hair at his left temple then, for good measure, scratched his right temple. “I’m quite self-sufficient in this observatory. Assistants are rather a luxury. Nobody on Earth wants to fund
two
astronomers on the Moon, when one person and some computers will do just as well.”

King had heard from Major Fox and Chief Ansari that Dr. Wu was something of an odd duck. Though he spent much of his time isolated in the astro bubble with computers, imagers, spectrographs, and data printouts, he occasionally visited the main base modules. He picked up supplies, attended mandatory meetings, received regular medical checkups, then returned to his observatory as quickly as possible.

King thought he understood the older man pretty well. “I like to work alone, too, Dr. Wu. Maybe we can find some good science for me to do, where I won’t be stepping on your toes.”

The astronomer seemed relieved at that. “Then I think we’ll get along quite well, young man. This place is cramped, so it’s easy to step on my toes.”

Dr. Wu led him into a crowded control room that was obviously his private nest. The office was equipped with high-res computer screens, two lightweight chairs (though one looked as though it had never been used) and a mesh hammock, the ends of which were epoxied to the metal walls. Noting King’s interest in the hammock, Dr. Wu explained, “In the low gravity it works quite well.”

“You take a lot of naps here, sir?”

“I work until I’m tired. Sometimes I don’t notice how many hours I’ve gone without sleep, and it seems like too much trouble to suit up just to go to my bunk in the hab bubble. This is just as comfortable. And quiet.

“A long time ago on Earth, astronomers had to be night-owls. It was part of the job. They slept during the day and stared through their telescopes at night. For the past century or so, however, as long as someone could operate the imagers, photographic plates, and spectrographs, astronomers could sleep at night and look at the collected data during normal working hours.” Wu grinned again. “I think that was when the stargazing profession lost part of its charm.”

Through the narrow windows, King looked out to see the telescope array, not far away. Perfectly polished hexagonal mirror segments fitted together like a giant puzzle to make a large reflecting area with precise curves that swept up, supported by a stilt-like structure; a smaller mirror dangled from the central framework.

“The large primary mirror gathers the light, focuses it, and reflects it up to the secondary mirror, which sends the image to our recording devices.” Dr. Wu sounded proud. “We have a radio telescope in a nearby crater, too. During my tenure here at the moonbase, we’ve compiled an extraordinary database of images. We can use filters to view through a particular part of the spectrum.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard about that,” King said.

Excited to have found a kindred spirit, Wu went to a large flat tabletop screen and called up images that his lunar telescope had taken. A splash of color with swirls, loops, and a haze of gases filled the screen. “The Crab Nebula is an expanding cloud of gases and debris from a supernova, a star that exploded. The light arrived here in 1054, when Chinese and Arab astronomers recorded the bright new star in the sky.”

King looked at the diffuse, colorful blob. “That’s a star?”

“What’s left of it. Even though it’s 6,500 light years away, the flash was so bright it was visible in the sky on Earth
during daylight.
When a star goes supernova, it lets out a final flash of glory and becomes a sun that is briefly brighter than the entire galaxy.

Dr. Wu wasn’t finished showing off, though. “And here’s the Orion Nebula, an enormous cloud of gas. Those bright lights in the middle are newborn stars. They’re so hot that they burn out quickly—only a few hundred million years—but they blaze so brightly that they light up the pool of gasses around them with those colors.”

Wu called up another image, this time a dense cluster of stars that looked like a swarm of glowing bees whirling around a disturbed hive. “And this is a globular cluster in the constellation Hercules. It’s like a lump in your morning hot cereal—several hundred thousand stars all in one big mass.”

“The image is so clear, you can see the individual stars,” King exclaimed.

“Much higher resolution than any Earth-based telescope can get. Do you know why?”

King wanted to hum a song about stars, but figured that would probably bother Dr. Wu, so he resisted. “It probably has to do with the Moon having no atmosphere. No smog or clouds to get in the way, nothing to filter out the starlight?”

“True, but even when there are no obscuring clouds in Earth’s atmosphere, water vapor and air currents can disturb images.”

“Makes sense,” King said. “That’s why so many great observatories are on mountaintops—to avoid most of the atmospheric crud.”

“The less atmosphere the better,” Wu agreed. “That’s what makes satellites so useful: we can send them above the atmosphere. But this lunar observatory is far superior to any previous telescope outside of Earth.” Wu drew a long deep breath. “As you can see, we do remarkable astronomy here, but there’s no telling how long this observatory can remain in operation.”

“Why?” King was alarmed.

“Even though this telescope can see to the farthest fringes of the universe, most people don’t consider the stars important.”

“Maybe we just need to explain how useful the information is,” King said.

Wu’s shoulders slumped. “I agree, young man, but this is
pure
science. Few people on Earth are willing to pay for expensive research unless they see practical benefits
right now.
Who’s interested in taking pictures of the universe as a long-term investment in the future?”

King gaped. “I am! I’ve had to plan ahead and look toward the future. You want to hear about my Eagle Scout project?”

“You’re an Eagle Scout?” Dr. Wu glanced at him with new respect. “Impressive.”

“I will be, as soon as my project is done. I started five months ago, but it takes time.” King decided not to get into the details of time travel and which specific year he was talking about. “I saw too many vacant lots not far from where I lived. Sidewalks torn up, stretches of bare dirt piled with litter. They made our part of town look like a war zone.

“So I decided to plant trees for my Eagle Scout project. I contacted the Forest Service, and they told me where volunteers could get tree seedlings. Usually, the little trees are used for replanting hillsides to protect against erosion after forest fires, but I wanted to add trees to my city.

“The Forest Service donated a lot of what I needed, and I raised money at school to buy more. I got a few friends together, and we spent most weekends carrying around burlap sacks of seedlings that we planted in corners of vacant lots, empty dirt patches next to sidewalks, dead spots in parks and playgrounds.

“The seedlings are small, so I know some won’t survive, but the rest are taking root. It’ll take years for those trees to grow tall and strong—I’ll probably be finished with college before they even get as tall as my waist! But it’ll eventually pay off. My children and grandchildren will look at those trees and know that my friends and I planted them. You can’t expect a big tree to grow overnight. Important things take time.”

Dr. Wu smiled. “Like science. People don’t understand that worthwhile projects involve trial and error, so sometimes you have
errors
along the way. If scientists knew exactly what to do, there wouldn’t be much
research
involved in discovering something significant, would there?”

King looked back down at the beautiful images of the cosmos the astronomer had shown him. “How can I help?”

The shy man chuckled. “You just may have the dedication and patience we need after all! There are plenty of things we don’t know about our own neighborhood’ yet. For instance, many thousands of asteroids are in erratic orbits in the inner solar system and could cross Earth’s orbit. Comets come from the outer solar system, fifty thousand times farther from the sun than the Earth is. They can surprise us when we first spot them, because many of them have never been seen in recorded human history.”

Dr. Wu called up an image of a lush starfield, a black background spangled with an immense number of white dots. He toggled to a second image that looked exactly like the first.

“These images were taken a week apart, of the same section of sky. The stars are so far away that their position appears fixed from one week to the next. But for a moving object closer to home, we can spot differences over time.

“If you switch back and forth between the two images, anything in our solar system, appears to jump, while the background remains the same. This old-fashioned technique is called a blink comparison.

“We could send the data to be processed by computers on Earth, but we can do it here as well. The human eye is very good at judging movement. If you study the images flicking back and forth, one of the stars might ‘jump’ from one week to the next. That means it’s probably a minor planet, an asteroid, or a comet. We can calculate its orbit and add it to the catalog of known objects.”

King perked up. “You mean I could discover something new?”

“You may even find an object that intersects Earth’s orbit. In that case, for obvious reasons, it’s very important that we identify it and watch it.”

“In case it could hit Earth?”

“Think of it this way, Cadet King. Ninety-three million years ago, the dinosaurs were a very successful species, but they weren’t watching the skies.
They
had no warning that an asteroid was coming.” Wu raised his eyebrows. “The human race can do better than that. We’re smart enough to avoid disasters … unless we stop looking.” He sighed. “Unfortunately, not many of us are left paying attention.”

King looked down at the broad starfield on the image in front of him. Commander Zota had warned about a future crisis. Did it have anything to do with the stars? There were so many to watch! He knew the job would require intense concentration, might even be considered tedious or boring—but it was
important.
The recent meteor shower that had threatened the moonbase demonstrated that unexpected danger could come from the skies.

Dr. Wu had a far-off expression. “These pictures of the cosmos remind me of all the wonders out there, and make me consider what else we might yet discover.”

Considering the possibility of unmapped asteroids, King said, “But what if we find something threatening?”

Dr. Wu chuckled. “Oh, come now. The universe is not out to get us, my young friend.”

***