220: Chapter 220 Next Round, Wake It Up

Three hours later, only half of the overhead lights were on in the qingqiong-1 mission control hall.

Twenty-six of the thirty-six control seats were occupied, while the remaining positions were piled with verification reports, boxed coffee, and newly unboxed headphones.

The orbital line of qingqiong-1 slowly moved in from the left side of the main screen into the visible range of the Western cooperative station.

There were still nine minutes left in the window.

Song Yao wrote the current authorization generated by the two cryptographic keys into the uplink system, and Xu Kaiyang signed the final page of the flight program.

Jiang Lin sat at the recovery technology console.

There were only three screens in front of him; the left displayed the real-time spectrum, the middle showed the command tree, and the right was connected to the shadow star of the Low Entropy Workshop.

Every time the ground issued an official command, the shadow star would receive a copy at the exact same moment for the mission team to compare hardware responses.

"Western station has captured the orbital target."

"Local oscillator locked."

"Noise floor is normal."

The duty officer's commands fell in succession.

The orbital marker on the main screen crossed the first green boundary line, but no signal was yet visible in the spectrum.

Jiang Lin reported the relevant parameters.

The receiver moved along the predicted Doppler curve, accumulating for 4.2 seconds beneath the noise, and an extremely thin white line lifted from the bottom.

"Suspected carrier captured, signal-to-noise ratio negative three point seven."

Song Yao confirmed the time.

"Entering the first command window."

The first set of short pulses was sent toward the sky.

The carrier on the screen lingered for an extra 0.8 seconds where it should have disappeared.

The second pulse was emitted, extending the carrier by 1.6 seconds.

The third pulse pushed it to 3.2 seconds.

Someone behind the control seats gripped the edge of the table tightly.

In the ninety-seven days, the more than four hundred sets of commands issued by the ground had never received any verifiable execution feedback.

Now, that white line was staying alive longer each time, following the rhythm Jiang Lin had written.

"Remote terminal execution valid."

Song Yao wrote this sentence into the official log.

Jiang Lin updated the roll envelope based on the phase difference of the three carriers.

The satellite's actual slow-roll period was 6 minutes and 12.8 seconds, with the error narrowed to within 0.4 seconds, and the window for the antenna's next sweep toward the ground was consequently determined.

The remaining time at the first station was not enough to request telemetry.

The command tree stopped at the safe-hold node, letting qingqiong-1 rotate out of the ground antenna's direction once again.

When the white line sank back into the noise, no one in the mission control hall issued an extra command.

This satellite could hear.

Six hours later, the second cooperative station took over the target.

The ground achieved early capture based on the new roll phase, and the first segment of the carrier deviated from the prediction by only 0.3 seconds.

Three sets of short pulses re-established a temporary clock, and the third command requested the lowest-speed telemetry from the remote terminal.

A string of un-verifiable bits appeared on the receiving screen first.

Song Yao switched to repeat mode.

The second string lacked seven codes in the same position as the first, the third string made up five of them, and the fourth string made up the final two.

Through majority voting, the four residual frames were pieced together into the first complete frame of telemetry since qingqiong-1 lost contact.

The main screen in the hall automatically expanded the fields.

[Battery State of Charge: 22.8%]

[Remote Terminal: Operational]

[Main Computer A: Boot Verification Suspended]

[Main Computer B: Cold Standby Available]

[Attitude Mode: Passive Slow Roll]

[Sun Sensor 1: Active]

[Star Tracker: Offline]

Several branches on the twenty-seven fault trees that had once mutually excluded each other were pieced together in this single frame.

qingqiong-1 first experienced a power drop, Machine A suspended during the reboot verification, and attitude control subsequently exited.

The remote terminal survived on independent power, and the transponder briefly drew power when the solar wings turned to a favorable angle.

The fault happened to span across the gaps between several subsystems, which was why the short carriers received by the ground in the past could not be completely explained by any single fault tree.

Jiang Lin clicked open the second-tier command branch.

"Freeze Machine A writes, boot Machine B in read-only."

"Sun Sensor 1 connects for coarse orientation, reaction wheel torque limit at twenty percent."

The attitude group, software group, and power group recited the parameters respectively.

Xu Kaiyang approved the execution.

The command was sent up in four segments.

The first segment protected Machine A's storage area, the second powered on Machine B, the third only read the boot page verification value, and the fourth allowed Machine B to take over the bare minimum attitude control only after confirming the verification matched.

Before the window ended, "Main Computer B" in the telemetry changed from cold standby to read-only operation, and the sun sensor data also began entering the attitude page.

The satellite was still slow-rolling, and the battery had only increased by 0.2 percentage points.

The first wave of applause rang out in the mission control hall.

Shao Cen stopped after clapping three times, raising a hand to point at the still-changing battery curve.

"Let it get some sun first."

The third window opened before qingqiong-1 approached perigee.

The geomagnetic field here was stronger, and the on-board attitude actuators also had better working conditions.

Jiang Lin did not let the satellite stop rolling all at once.

The reaction wheels shaved off only a small segment of angular velocity each time, while the magnetic torquers simultaneously unloaded the accumulated momentum.

When the solar wings turned past the optimal angle, the control law slightly extended the dwell time; when turning into an unfavorable angle, it maintained sufficient rolling to prevent the thermal environment on either side from changing too quickly.

The slow-roll period was stretched from 6 minutes and 12 seconds to 11 minutes, and then to 27 minutes.

After the final command segment was executed, the two-axis errors of Sun Sensor 1 simultaneously entered the allowable range.

The solar wing input power on the main screen began to rise continuously.

Twenty-two point nine percent.

Twenty-four point one percent.

Twenty-six point seven percent.

The red background frame of the battery page turned yellow when it crossed thirty percent.

Machine B obtained full bus read access, and low-speed telemetry increased from one frame per minute to one frame every ten seconds.

The thermal control, power, attitude, payload, and memory states lit up page by page.

The scientific data accumulated before losing contact was still there, and the mission log was also saved up to the last 1.7 seconds before power loss.

Xu Kaiyang sat back down in his chair, pressed his hands on his knees for a moment, and then queued Machine A's fault dump task to the very end.

The satellite had just recovered power, and curiosity was the cheapest thing right now.

Let it charge first.

After the third window ended, qingqiong-1 entered an eleven-hour sunlight arc.

The mission control hall took shifts to rest, leaving ten people guarding the low-speed beacon.

The carrier on the public frequency had changed from intermittent short lines to a continuous signal.

The first to report it was not the mission team.

At 4:17 AM, an amateur radio enthusiast in Chengdu uploaded a spectrum screenshot to a forum with a title of only six characters.

[qingqiong-1 is back?]

Within ten minutes, receiving stations in Beijing, Harbin, Tokyo, and Helsinki successively provided the same Doppler curve.

The mission authorities had originally planned to issue an announcement after full telemetry recovery, but the public beacon reported that it was safe ahead of time for them.

Shao Cen looked over the spreading screenshot and asked the publicity staff to remove the question mark.

An official announcement was issued immediately.

[qingqiong-1 has resumed low-speed telemetry, and its current energy and attitude states are stable. The mission team is restoring on-board functions according to procedure.]

The announcement attached the public beacon frequency and orbital element updates, allowing global receivers to verify for themselves.

Within one hour, the mission authorities received 137 independent reception reports, forty-one of which retained the raw intermediate frequency data.

Song Yao had the system automatically verify time and Doppler, not picking the prettiest screenshots, but writing all qualified records into the public status page.

The return of qingqiong-1 no longer relied on any announcement in the mission control hall; the continuous carrier in the sky was being caught simultaneously by antennas at different locations.

When the fourth window arrived, two groups of people had already gathered outside the mission control hall.

One group consisted of teachers and students who had participated in the development but were not on the current duty roster, and the other was media temporarily blocked outside the glass doors.

Inside the hall, operations were still carried out according to the flight program.

qingqiong-1 completed coarse sun pointing, the battery state of charge rose to sixty-one percent, the on-board clock was re-calibrated with the ground, telemetry resumed at normal rates, and the payload storage area was successfully mounted as read-only.

After verifying the final set of attitude parameters, Jiang Lin submitted the activation conditions for the high-gain data transmission into the review queue.

Song Yao and Xu Kaiyang confirmed respectively.

After the command was uplinked, the data rate on the right side of the main screen jumped from 1,200 bits per second to 256 kilobits per second.

The first packet of mission logs fell into the ground server.

The second packet was attitude history.

The third packet came from the dust impact detector, with the timestamp stopping at the fourth hour after losing contact.

The data packets that followed pushed the timeline further forward.

One day.

Ten days.

Thirty days.

Ninety days.

During the period without telemetry, the payload of qingqiong-1 had briefly worked whenever power allowed, and data had continuously been written into the independent storage area.

The timer in the upper right corner of the main screen stopped accumulating.

[Continuous Without Valid Telemetry: 97 days 18 hours 43 minutes]

The system moved this line into the history records, replacing the original position with a new status.

[qingqiong-1: Full Telemetry Recovered]

Song Yao marked the flight programs of the four windows as completed in turn.

The young engineer who had left behind "suspected on-board response" on the nineteenth day of lost contact sat in the second row, responsible for receiving the final packet of mission logs.

After the data packet passed verification, he took the already-filled window duty logbook out of the drawer and added the recovery time on the final page.

Every shift of the previous ninety-seven days had someone's signature.

After signing the final line, he handed the notebook over to the next console without holding it up for the camera to see.

Outside the glass doors, however, someone had already recognized the status on the main screen.

Students who participated in the development of qingqiong-1 crowded the corridor; some covered their mouths, some made video calls to their mentors far away, and some gave thumbs-up to the control seats through the glass.

Xu Kaiyang took off his headphones and first called the veteran factory director who was still producing spare parts for qingqiong-1.

After the call connected, he said only one sentence.

"The star has returned."

The other side paused for two seconds, followed by the sound of a chair being knocked over and a flurry of commotion calling people over to see the announcement.

The mission control hall's recording system captured these sounds as well; together with the commands from the four windows, they became part of the recovery archive for qingqiong-1.

Shao Cen stood up from the chief scientist's seat and walked over to Jiang Lin's console.

"What else are we doing on the next orbit?"

Jiang Lin looked at the dust detection data still being downloaded.

"On the next orbit, it's its turn to tell us what it saw over these ninety-seven days."