“Of course, even if the object intersects Earth’s orbit, it is still unlikely that it would do so at the exact time the Earth is at that exact point in its orbit. However, until we can more accurately pin down the object’s current speed, rate of acceleration and distance, we can’t pinpoint where the Earth will be in its own orbit as the object passes through the ecliptic, nor where the other inner planets will be. It looks like the Earth will be somewhere on the same side of its orbit as the side that the object will pass through. I don’t want to raise the alarm, but there is at least a finite risk of a collision that I can’t rule out without additional data.”
“Okay, Tony,” said Eleanor, “you did the right thing to call us together. Let me sum up what I think you are telling us, but I’ll preface by saying I see nothing here that should cause us any great concern. This scenario is similar to many of our initial Near-Earth Object sightings where we have insufficient information at first to rule out a collision. Most of the time it’s an asteroid in the plane of the ecliptic and so if it intersects Earth’s orbit it does so at least twice and possibly four times each pass, and it will continue to do so on a periodic basis for a long time to come. Here we seem to have a one-pass single-intersection-point risk if there’s any orbital intersection at all. So, on that hand we have a much lower risk than a typical NEO initial detection.
“On the other hand, we have some interesting differences. First, Tony, you seem to be suggesting that this is neither an asteroid nor a typical comet. It is coming from an unusual direction, it is coming unusually fast, and it is not following an orbital path. Are you thinking that this object has come from interstellar space rather than from the distant reaches of the solar system? Hold your response for a moment. Regardless of where it originated, we don’t yet have any direct observation; therefore, no mass estimate — and it is coming fast. At the speed it is coming it wouldn’t take much mass to create a major high-energy impact. That doesn’t change the very low risk of a collision, but it does mean a collision could have high consequences.
“So, I think that means this is not a dire situation. Mr. Director, I think we should keep this to just the four of us for now until we have a clearer picture. We all remember the initial scare with Apophis, which eventually proved to be harmless. At the same time, I think we should take this seriously and attach the highest priority to improving our information and the accuracy of our path prediction, timing of approach, and mass estimate. This should be the highest priority tasking of the LSST for the next while. Tony, does that square with your thinking?”
Tony was an applied mathematician, but he was also savvy enough not to disagree with his boss in front of her boss.
“Yes Eleanor, it does seem like this X/2027U3 may come from outside our solar system, and I agree that the risk of a collision is low, and I especially agree that we should make getting more data our top priority. Whether we should be advising anyone further up within NASA is not for me to say.”
The director said, “Eleanor and Tony, thanks for this briefing. It is interesting, if at least a little worrisome. How long will it take you to refine your analysis, and can we find a little less cryptic name for this thing, but not one with any scary connotations?”
Tony replied, “Well, any additional observations would help, but we need to see this thing at least another couple of hundred million miles along its path to really cut down the estimate error bands, so about another five weeks, assuming we can spot it at that point. I haven’t run its trajectory against the stellar background to know whether it might occlude another star at about that point in time. That’s something the LSST folk are best equipped to do.”
The director grimaced, “Eleanor, that’s a long time for me to sit on this without briefing the top of the house. I’ll give you two weeks to refine your risk assessment and then, even if I prove to be Chicken Little, I have to update my boss. George, can you keep this under wraps while still giving it top priority on the Big Eye?”
The senior scientist did not work for the director of the JPL, wasn’t a government employee and had his own chain of accountability to consider, but he had a lot of discretion on the operation of the LSST during his tenure on site. He also agreed with the importance of clarifying the collision risk for X/2027U3.
“Yes, Mr. Director, I think I can manage that for the next little while. I am going to need to assign an astronomer to oversee this project, but I think I know just the right person, and she also already knows a lot about X/2027U3 since she’s the one who was using the Big Eye when the object was first spotted by the transient detector. I may be able to help you out with a better name too. We will stay in close touch as further information emerges.”
The video conference wrapped up and each of the participants went to work on their assigned tasks. Tony Galletsia had an uneasy sense that his boss was a little too optimistic about the risk posed by X/2027U3, but it was gut feeling only and he wasn’t about to contradict her unless he had something more concrete to go on.
Chapter 17
Early January, 2028
Sonoma County, Northern California
Brad pulled his Super Stock E-Class 2018 Camaro SS “Red Rocket” out of the staging lanes and lined up in the burnout area of the left lane of the Sonoma Raceway drag strip, as directed by the staging crew. He punched the throttle and spun his eleven-inch slicks in the wetted-down area to clean off any dirt or gravel and let them smoke a bit on the dry pavement at the back of the staging area to warm and soften the tires. He glanced to the right as he inched forward up to the staging line to see where the Shelby GT350 in the next lane was. He moved to the pre-stage line and then the stage line as quickly as possible, knowing his opponent would have to rush just a bit to get staged in time to avoid a race delay disqualification in this, the final Super Stock match of the meet.
Brad’s five-hundred-plus-horsepower, 6.2-liter LT1 engine was running strong, and he had the suspension and wheelie bars well-tuned. He had dialed in a time of 9.5 seconds, not quite a second faster than the NHRA index for his class, but his opponent was in the same Super Stock E-Class, so it would be a heads-up race; whoever crossed the finish line first would win with no handicap and no risk of disqualifying on a breakout below dial-in.
The twenty-eight-year-old mechanical engineer knew that the Mustang would be pulling more horsepower than his Camaro. He also knew it was proportionately heavier. He figured he had a modest advantage on torque with his larger displacement, longer stroke engine. It would produce a little more torque at a lower RPM than the hard-working, high-revving, 5.2-liter Shelby power plant. He would need to grab a couple of car lengths out of the hole to avoid being caught by the Shelby at the top end.
The right-hand lane pre-stage and stage lights came on, and a fraction of a second later the three orange lights on both sides of the Christmas tree flashed on, followed 0.4 seconds later by the green “go” light. Brad punched the throttle to the floor the instant the oranges lit. He was relying on his brief reaction time and the foot or so his car could move before triggering the elapsed-time timer to avoid incurring a red light disqualification if the green light hadn’t yet come on.
The big slicks dug in and loaded up, with the soft side walls wrinkling up as they absorbed a portion of the torque energy from the big motor. The Red Rocket launched forward with minimum wheel spin and just a little front-end lift before the wheelie bars counteracted that tendency.
Brad paid no attention to the right-hand lane. He was concentrating entirely on keeping his car straight and centered as the eight-speed programmed automatic transmission kept his motor close to its six thousand RPM horsepower peak, and his car rapidly accelerated down the track. From the stands his girlfriend, Alyssa, and other spectators could see that the Camaro pulled a good two-and-a-half car length holeshot on the Mustang and held it through the first half of the quarter-mile strip. The Mustang began to close the gap, but the Camaro was still a good length-and-a-half in front at the quarter mile.
From what Alyssa later told him about the length of his holeshot at the starting line and his lead at the finish line, Brad figured he might have launched about a tenth of a second sooner than the Shelby. His 0.04 second lower elapsed time would only account for about nine feet of his car length and a half, or twenty-four foot, finish line lead. Most of the lead must have come from being quicker off the mark. He was happy with the car’s performance and his own.
Brad Webber was an analytical thinker by nature. It was a style that fit well with both his job as a design engineer at Energy Systems Inc. in Santa Rosa and his hobby as a race car builder and driver. He was comfortable with the technical aspects and physics behind both heating and cooling systems and high performance motors, but he also enjoyed rolling up his sleeves, grabbing a tool kit and fixing just about anything.
As they drove back from Sonoma to Healdsburg for the weekend, Alyssa thought about their relationship and how far it might go. She knew they had some common interests, but also some differences. Although she was intelligent and educated, her approach to thinking through a problem was more intuitive than analytical. When Brad and Alyssa tackled something together, they had to navigate their different thought styles and work out how their styles could complement each other.
They were both conservation minded, though Alyssa found Brad’s love of high horsepower engines and drag racing to be a little inconsistent with minimizing their environmental footprint. Alyssa’s price for being Brad’s pit monkey and cheerleader for a day of racing was that he would help her out with her morning volunteer shift at the Healdsburg Food Pantry the next day. After that they’d ride up to the power plant to work on her latest extracurricular project. Brad was entirely on board with this agenda, and she didn’t really begrudge him his occasional day of tire-smoking, engine-roaring fun. She was looking forward to a romantic dinner and the intimate ecstasy that would follow.
The next day they arrived at the plant at about noon, after an hour and a quarter grunt up the two-thousand-five-hundred-foot altitude gain from Healdsburg. They’d brought bread and cheese and a bottle of wine for lunch, which they set out on a picnic table at the far corner of the plant’s parking lot, as far from the humming steam turbine as possible.
After lunch they checked out a few things. First was the makeshift vapor recovery system for pressure spikes releasing through the main pressure relief valve situated just before the pressure regulation manifold outside the plant. One of Alyssa’s biggest challenges was managing the amount of makeup water that needed to be injected into the geothermal system to compensate for water losses, both below ground and above. The condenser system inside the plant and downstream of the turbine was designed specifically to recover nearly all the water from the superheated steam spinning the turbine. From there the recycle water was pumped back to the various injection wells to sustain steam pressure in the reservoir rock lying above the magma pool four miles below.
Normally the steam recovery and recycle system worked quite effectively, and it needed to. Western Renewable Power had no local water rights. The water in nearby Little Sulphur Creek was strictly off limits. The company did have a contract to draw water off the Santa Rosa treated wastewater pipeline system, which had been constructed several decades previously to feed the geothermal plants in The Geysers area. However, there were limits to the availability from that source and for several months the Western Renewable Power plant had been pushing up against those limits.
Alyssa had identified the culprit as being her main pressure relief valve. Normally the pressure regulation manifold could control the incoming steam pressure by routing the steam through a variety of expansion chambers or even bleeding a little off into a holding tank. However, when an occasional pressure spike exceeded the manifold’s capacity, the main pressure relief valve would be forced open and steam would vent directly to the atmosphere. She liked to keep the setting on the valve fairly low to provide quick relief and minimize the risk of a spike-within-a-spike overpressuring the system and causing a catastrophic turbine failure.
For several months the frequency of relief valve releases had been quite a bit higher than normal. Alyssa had verified that the valve was functioning properly, but the subterranean steam reservoir feeding her steam wells seemed to be having an extended case of burps. She had checked with the other large operator in the area, and they were experiencing similar surges. Nobody was seeing anything extreme enough to be dangerous for now, though it was a little troubling, and it was certainly a nuisance.
Alyssa was keeping in close touch with the United States Geological Survey agency, which monitored tremors in much of California, making sure she would be forewarned if anything serious appeared to be developing. In the meanwhile, after discussing her problem with Brad, they had devised a solution of sorts.
The relief valve vented horizontally at a point just after the collection manifold, which routed the pipes from all the steam wells into a single larger pipe, about a hundred feet before the pressure control manifold. The steam plumes would typically jet fifty or a hundred feet out to the side, and the area was enclosed with a chain-link fence well marked with warning signs.
Surrounding the valve and extending almost to the fence line, there was now a large polyethylene tent. Beneath the tent, and extending a couple of feet beyond its edges, was a second, flatter, inverted tent, the bottom of which was about two feet above the ground at its low point in the center, where it fed into a plastic tube.
The steam plumes from the valve rose, expanded, and condensed, with the resulting water vapor particles either drifting down to the lower surface or rising to the upper surface. They dripped from the upper surface down onto the lower surface. Eventually all the condensate would collect at the low point, run down the tubing and be pumped into the main water recovery collection tank. If it happened to rain, which it did in the winter, the system would also collect all the rain that fell onto the upper tent. It wasn’t too pretty, but it worked, and it was a cheap solution. Plus, working on it together had been a positive experience for Alyssa and Brad.
After looking over their vapor collection system to make sure it was functioning properly, they moved on to their next project. This was the one that Alyssa was really excited about. It combined several different attributes that were close to her heart. From early on in her job as plant superintendent, she had been struck by how much natural geothermal energy was being wasted because there was no use for the low-grade steam coming off the back end of the turbine, other than to capture it and recycle the resulting hot water back into the reservoir. She had ample heat energy but no good use to put it to.
Then, while volunteering at the Healdsburg Food Pantry, she had learned that much of the fresh produce they distributed to needy families in the area was donated by local farms, except in the winter time when it was too cool to grow vegetables in Northern California. The Pantry would then have to dip into its cash to buy produce wholesale from Southern California. Alyssa had a green thumb and kept a small greenhouse in her backyard for her own vegetables and flowers; so she knew you could grow them year-round with a little supplementary heating and a smart ventilation system to regulate temperature and humidity. Then the penny dropped, and she realized she had found a possible way to put the wasted heat energy from the geothermal plant to good use, though there were still many details to work out.
The final impetus for her project also originated from her volunteer mornings, once a week, at the Pantry. One of he
r fellow volunteers there was an older man named Jose Ortiz. Jose was also a regular client of the Pantry. He had been a farmworker for most of his life but had reached an age where he was no longer strong enough or productive enough to get much work. He and his wife were scraping by on food from the Pantry, some meager savings, and occasional temporary jobs. Yet Jose was a warm, friendly man who didn’t seem to resent his situation. Alyssa felt sorry, and even a little guilty, when she thought about how much she had in her life compared with the Ortiz’s. She had wished she could think of some way to help them short of giving them a handout, which she knew they would be uncomfortable with.
Jose had been more than grateful to join Alyssa’s greenhouse project, and he was an important and essential addition. He knew a lot about growing produce, and he was plenty hale enough to tend to the operation of a greenhouse. He had a beat-up old truck to go back and forth in, hauling supplies up to the plant and produce back to Healdsburg. Perhaps most important of all, he and his wife had the time to set up a stall at a nearby farmer’s market or two each week and to deliver the rest of the produce to the local grocery stores. Once they started harvesting in December, about one third of the weekly production went to the Food Pantry and the rest got sold. About half of the cash revenue was enough to cover wages and gas for Jose and his wife, with the remainder into a bank account for unexpected expenses.
Of course there had been many more details to work through before she was able to put a seed in the dirt. She had needed to get permission from Western Renewable Power. If it had been a bigger company that would probably never have happened, but the company was small and Alyssa was well known and well liked. It also helped that Alyssa had solved the recycle water loss problem at minimal expense to the company. In her pitch, Alyssa pointed out that it couldn’t hurt to further strengthen the company’s image in the community by covering the Food Pantry’s needs. So, the company humored her on the basis that there would be no disruption to the plant or any expense to the plant beyond a small initial donation and part of the water recovered by the vapor collection system.
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