He repeated his question to Norman. “Have you seen imaging from the past cycle?”
“Last night,” Norman said, “and thank you again for the login. Hours of fun. Hours, Perry.”
“Did you see the flare?”
“Yes. Two of ’em, big ones. SUVI picked it up. They saturated the X-ray irradiance sensors, so I haven’t checked back. Why?”
Perry paused on the other end, thinking. “Is it possible they masked a secondary burst? Or tertiary?”
Norman furrowed his brow. “I suppose. Did the radiation hit DSCOVR yet?”
DSCOVR, the Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite, had been a crucial tool in the monitoring of space weather in general and solar activity in particular since late 2015, when after its successful launch it took up its orbit at Lagrange point 1, a neutral gravity sweet spot about a million miles from the earth. From there, DSCOVR essentially hovered in place between the earth and sun, the array of sensors in its nose beaming near-to-real-time information back to NOAA.
“Yes,” Perry answered, “they’ll miss earth by seven degrees in about forty-five minutes. It’s what’s behind them I’m talking about.”
“What’s behind them?”
“There was a third flare, zero degrees of inflection, and it’s moving through cleared space. New images are posted in the nowcasting. Take a look. I’ll wait.”
Ignoring the coffee, Norman took the cordless phone into his study and sat at the big oak dining table he used for a desk. He flipped open his laptop, cradled the phone on his shoulder, and went directly to the NOAA site that featured integrated images from GOES-16 and NASA’s orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory. To the untrained eye, the sets of solar images and strings of data on Norman’s screen would have been meaningless, but to a mind that had been assimilating data both in visual and quantitative form like this for sixty-five years, the coronal captures and strings of numeric data he saw were the astronomical equivalent of a guy standing on the edge of a cliff, waving a lantern, and screaming, “The bridge is out!”
“Angle of inflection was what now?” Norman asked.
“Zero,” Perry repeated, though he was sure Norman had heard him.
Norman blinked. He absorbed the data. Twice.
“This can’t be right,” he said.
“Let’s assume it is,” Perry said. “Do you have time to run a few models?”
“I’m eighty-eight fucking years old, Perry. Of course I have time.”
“Model out the particle radiation at geostationary orbit,” Perry said.
“No kidding.” Norman was fully alert and on it now. He opened up a second laptop, logged in to the CME public monitoring dashboard run by the Goddard Space Flight Center, and began to pull data from the hundreds of amateur enthusiasts all over the world who kept an unofficial eye on sunspot activity. Perry wasn’t the only one who’d noticed the unusual amounts of proton and X-ray flux that had erupted in the past eighteen hours. The sun-watching community was recording, posting, and interpreting like mad. What Norman saw confirmed what Perry had suggested: there had been not one but a series of three flares, each bigger than the last, and the sheer luminosity of the first two had, in effect, blinded the array of monitoring equipment to the massive third flare, which had released a CME that was now surfing through space in the relatively clear solar wake of the previous disruptions.
The information Norman began loading into his self-designed modeling software was complex and wide-ranging, covering physical and technological risk factors to the earth’s power supply based on the potential impact of a plasma field of the size and intensity they’d just recorded. When he hit enter and the final result displayed in a small flashing box on his screen, Norman felt the floor sinking away from him.
“Shit,” he said.
“What’d you get?”
“My model’s no good. Running another. Hang on.” He cleared the field and started over, pulling data from different collection sites around the world, running an alternate scenario, varying the electrical-field amplitudes and direction as widely as he could imagine. He wanted a different outcome.
He wanted to be wrong.
At NOAA, Perry sat at his monitoring station and listened to Norman’s frantic typing on the other end of the phone. Norman had been one of the foremost solar researchers of his era for a reason: his models were never wrong. Perry knew whatever Norman’s first result had been, it would prove accurate. But he also knew better than to interrupt the old man while he was working. Impatient, Perry pulled data and ran his own models while he waited.