221: Chapter 221 Data Returned from the Death Star

It took nineteen hours for qingqiong-1's memory to complete the first round of downlink.

The mission logs, attitude history, payload data, and fault dumps were divided into four queues and landed on different servers.

The dust impact detector accumulated 671 sets of valid observation segments.

After the satellite lost attitude control, the payload only worked for a few minutes each time, and the records were not continuous. However, the slow roll allowed the detector's orientation to sweep across angles never planned in the original mission.

A satellite operating according to plan would maintain a prescribed attitude for a long time.

qingqiong-1 revolved more than 10,000 times in ninety-seven days, using a single-sided detector to complete a directional scan with an unexpectedly wide coverage.

When Shao Cen projected the first batch of data onto the main screen, the impact events were scattered like sesame seeds on the coordinate map.

The payload group had already begun making calibration corrections.

After reading the data directory, Jiang Lin asked the archivist to lock the impact event table after the loss of contact first.

Shao Cen asked, "It has already been recovered, still need to lock it?"

"This batch of data is very suitable for blind testing."

Jiang Lin pulled up the public observations of qingqiong-1 from two years before the loss of contact, and also accessed the scattering records of ground-based meteor radar and the zodiacal light survey background map.

"First write predictions using data we've already seen."

"Wait until the predictions are archived before opening these ninety-seven days."

Looking at the more than 600 sets of data right in front of them, the head of the payload group reached out and closed their own window.

"Fine."

"The whole group exits the permissions for the lost contact segment, and the archivist will keep it."

On the second day after the satellite was restored, the qingqiong-1 scientific team was divided into two rooms.

The archiving group continued to clean timestamps, temperature drift, and electronic noise, while the modeling group only obtained pre-loss-of-contact data, attitude reconstruction results, and observation window lists.

Jiang Lin projected the detector normal, attitude error, and effective acceptance cone at the time of each impact back into the heliocentric inertial coordinates, and then deducted the satellite's velocity, Earth's gravitational deflection, and the detector's geometric response.

This processing could not patch together an accurate orbit for a single speck of dust, but it could calculate the flux differences in different directions.

Past analyses mostly calculated flux based on orbital positions, which was suitable for answering where the satellite was more likely to collide with dust.

Jiang Lin changed the question.

As qingqiong-1's attitude and Earth's revolution constantly changed, which set of angular flux enhancements would remain in the same heliocentric inertial direction?

The error bars of the public data were very large, and there was still a weak asymmetry in the residuals that hadn't dispersed.

It did not coincide with the direction of the Sun, nor did it coincide with the perigee direction of qingqiong-1.

As the Earth revolved, that set of residuals moved slowly in local time coordinates, but always converged in the same narrow celestial region in heliocentric inertial coordinates.

When Gu Mingche came over from the center, Jiang Lin had already drawn more than a dozen families of dust orbits compatible with this celestial region on the whiteboard.

"Is this another positive number that won't disappear?"

"This time it moves."

Jiang Lin extended several orbits to the outside of Earth's orbit.

"Yet it stays still in the coordinates where it should be fixed."

This group of particles did not belong to any known annual meteor showers.

Their scale was smaller and their velocity distribution was wider, so they would not leave a naked-eye visible meteor shower on the ground on any given night.

Jiang Lin recovered a narrow and stable directional fine structure from the public data.

The Earth crossed its edges twice a year, and qingqiong-1's highly elliptical orbit further separated the perigee and apogee sampling, which happened to be able to distinguish the particle arrival direction from false peaks caused by the satellite's own motion.

He didn't give this structure a pretty astronomical name; what was written in the pre-registration document were four verifiable results.

In the lost-contact observation segment, a stable flux increment should appear near a specific inertial direction.

The increment peak would move with qingqiong-1's slow-roll phase and would not follow the detector temperature changes.

The peak widths of the perigee samples and apogee samples were different, and the difference was determined by Earth's gravitational deflection.

After deducting the known annual meteor shower windows, the structure still existed.

The four predictions, along with code, parameters, and allowable errors, were written into the center's public escrow database, and the system generated a timestamp and a hash value.

Shao Cen checked the document one last time.

"The name field can't be empty after all."

"Directional fine structure of near-Earth dust flux."

"Twenty-two characters."

"Shorter than the center's full name."

Shao Cen smiled and filled in the name.

That afternoon, the archivist opened the impact event table for the lost-contact segment.

The modeling group saw the true distribution of the ninety-seven days for the first time.

Jiang Lin had the archiving system cut it into ten parts according to the observation time, with the first part covering only the first nine days.

The head of the payload group ran the frozen code, and a narrow peak appeared within the pre-registered interval.

The second part came from the next section of sunlight conditions; the detector temperature was twelve degrees Celsius higher than the first part, but the peak remained in the same inertial direction.

For the third part, the satellite's roll period had changed, and the peak moved in the original body coordinates, but after conversion, it coincided with the first two parts.

The ten sets of data were opened one by one, and the four predictions on the whiteboard were marked as passed from top to bottom.

Opened last was the comparison between perigee and apogee.

The difference in peak width between the two curves fell into the range written down by Jiang Lin in advance, and the deviation of the center position was less than one angular bin of the detector.

The head of the payload group moved the mouse away from the curve, picked up the tea that had already gone cold, and took a sip.

"This detector never scanned this direction completely during the normal mission period."

Shao Cen said, "It can be arranged in the future."

"Is qingqiong-1's attitude life still sufficient?"

Xu Kaiyang brought up the status of the flywheel and magnetic torquers.

"Rough pointing is already stable, and we can do it by writing the scan into the mission extension task."

The discussion immediately turned to how to repeat the observations in the next stage.

The ninety-seven-day slow roll provided the first complete scan; subsequent controlled scans could improve angular resolution and actively change the satellite's velocity direction to further separate the contributions of different orbital families.

Shao Cen took the mission extension form and added a line below the original payload calibration.

[Controlled Scan of Near-Earth Dust Directional Fine Structure]

"This is a primary task, not an appendix."

Jiang Lin wrote the attitude angles and detection windows for six orbital periods into the mission simulator.

That night, the pre-registration documents, frozen code, and first-round verification results were opened to cooperative units.

An independent review group re-completed the attitude transformation and detector temperature drift correction. Using a tool chain different from Jiang Lin's, the resulting directional peak positions differed by less than half a bin.

The records of larger particles accumulated by ground-based radar over many years also showed a wider weak enhancement in the same inertial direction.

It could not replace qingqiong-1's measurements of micrometer-sized dust, but it supplemented this directional structure with evidence of another scale.

The next afternoon, a small satellite team from a European university sent forty-three sets of old events and complete filtering code into the center's public re-computation environment.

Their detector range was different from qingqiong-1's, and their orbit was lower; forty-three sets of events were not enough to independently announce a discovery.

The other party attached a drawn directional map in the email, but Jiang Lin did not let the technical liaison import it directly.

"Take out the direction column first, and rerun it according to their public filtering conditions."

The technical liaison left the event numbers, instrument status, and filtering code in the re-computation environment, while the arrival direction data was kept by another administrator.

The frozen filtering results left thirty-seven sets of events.

When the direction column was reconnected, twenty-nine of them fell within the allowable interval of the orbital family given by Jiang Lin, and the distribution width also matched the expectation of a narrower acceptance cone for low-Earth orbit satellites.

That team subsequently sent a joint analysis application, and Jiang Lin retained their data filtering, instrument interpretation, and code authorship in the contribution records.

The results of qingqiong-1 began to prompt other missions to reorganize the dust events in their old hard drives.

A temporary seminar on the space environment direction was scheduled into the center's main conference room, but the first question handed over from the media seats was whether this structure would turn into a new meteor shower on a certain night.

Jiang Lin drew the mass ranges of micrometer-sized particles and naked-eye meteoroids on the same logarithmic axis.

The two markers were separated by many orders of magnitude.

"If you want to watch a meteor shower, you can continue watching the weather forecast."

He put qingqiong-1's directional peak on the other side.

"What this instrument sees is a different matter."

The next day's reports no longer forecasted mysterious celestial phenomena; more people began to download that frozen code to recompute the narrow peak that would only converge when switched to the correct coordinate system.

The center's public queue reached over two hundred items within six hours. The technical liaison temporarily added a re-computation instance, but still did not let the queued tasks overwrite the baseline version signed by Jiang Lin.

When Gu Mingche came over to look for idle computing power, the discussion room that originally hung "Combinatorial and Discrete Geometry" had temporarily connected two space environment workstations.

The door sign hadn't been changed yet, and no one inside had time to care about it.

Hugging his computer, he stood at the door and watched for a while.

"Yesterday this room only studied points on a plane."

"Today it studies points that crash into satellites."

Jiang Lin took the attitude sequence of the controlled scan from the printer and made room for him at the corner of a table.

"It's still the same table, saving us from reapplying for an asset number."

The engineering recovery paper and the dust science paper subsequently established separate achievement archives.

qingqiong-1's original team was responsible for instrument calibration and data archiving, the recovery instruction tree was listed separately as an engineering achievement, and the directional fine structure was led by Jiang Lin for scientific analysis.

The center simultaneously registered the award evaluation cycle, material director, and application nodes. Although the paper had not yet been submitted, dedicated archive locations for subsequent awards and achievement attribution had already been established.

Jiang Lin checked the author contribution table item by item and signed his name.

He neither took away the credit for the qingqiong-1 team's three years of development nor would he delete himself from the primary discovery.

On the fifth day after the restoration, qingqiong-1 performed its first controlled scan.

The satellite continuously changed three attitude angles, and the acceptance cone of the single-sided detector crossed that pre-registered celestial region again.

When the data from the first orbital period returned to the ground, the peak fell in the center of the forecasted interval.

The second cycle actively changed the satellite's velocity direction; the false peak that might have been caused by platform motion shifted with the velocity vector, while the narrow peak remained in the original heliocentric inertial direction.

The mission hall wrote the new observations into the main sequence of the extended science mission.

On the main screen, the ninety-seven-day gray lost-contact segment was recolored.

Below that long strip of orbit, it was filled with 671 dust impact records.