Tenth in the series. Read after the break…
Insight
By Scott Lowther
Copyright 2019
1984, October: Goddard Space flight Center, Maryland
The Space Shuttle Challenger had been orbiting for a week on mission STS-41-G. The main scientific aspect of the mission was the Shuttle Imaging Radar-B (SIR-B), a radar system designed to look down at Earth and make detailed measurements. The radar used a wavelength that was able to look some distance through sand, thus in a sense it would be able to look back in time. A time before sand completely covered the region of Arabia, when the ground had lakes and streams and roads… and cities. One of the hoped-for goals of the radar mapping mission was the location of the legendary lost city of Ubar, the “Atlantis of the Sands,” thought to be located somewhere in the desert near Oman. But the mission had been plagued with difficulties… the KU-band radio transmitter went nuts and rotated uncontrollably; a space walk was needed to lock it down, and the Challenger had to orient itself to point the dish antenna at the lone Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS-1) then in orbit. The thirty-five-foot wide planar array radar antenna locked up and refused to move until it was nudged with the Shuttle’s manipulator arm. A short circuit degraded image quality.
It was almost as if someone didn’t want the Shuttle to see something.
After the Shuttle returned to Earth, data sent down via the TDRS was processed, and a number of roads and paths, packed into hard dirt by the passage of many camels over many years, were found. In years to come these paths were used to locate archeological sites, including one candidate for the lost city of Ubar.
But as Challenger orbited, Agent Freya Jones of the Office of Insight was at work at the Goddard Space Flight Center, intercepting the raw data as it came down. The numerous “malfunctions” on the Shuttle led to the data processing being slower than anticipated; unbeknownst to NASA, that data was fed through a small, surprisingly advanced computer that Agent Jones had plugged into the communications system. She got real-time imagery of the radar data, and quickly found what she’d been ordered to look for. There, plain as day, was a buried city. No roads led to it; it was seemingly isolated, well within the Empty Quarter. With a few strokes of a light pen on her computer screen, the city was effectively airbrushed out of the radar data. With that, the modified data was sent on to NASA: the original data was stored for delivery to the Office of Insight. Agent Jones did not have time to consider just what it all meant. A dead city buried under the burning Arabian desert sands? Sounded horrible. And it sounded like the sort of thing that would end up being inconsequential, of no use or interest to anyone.