Asteroid Belt

By D. E. Harrison

An English team has been mapping the asteroid belt for several years. Their goal is to know where every asteroid will be for the next 100 years. Except, they can no longer find the asteroids they have already mapped. They are no place to be found in their calculated error window. They need more computing power than there is in the UK.
Dr. CT writes on her cheerios’ box where she thinks the asteroids are going. Sir Clive finds more computing power in Area 51 in the USA. CT finally tells but not quite all she knows. Yes, Jupiter has for the last two years been eating all the asteroids as it passes close by.
A team is formed in the USA to discover what is occurring.
A Euro3 space probe is the only eyes they have on the back side of Jupiter. The probe and the super computer are saying something about Jupiter which no one can understand.
Is it the second note CT wrote in her Cheerios box that will tell all. What need does the team have for a deep earth researcher and his shock wave theories as they relate to the sun’s fusion process?
Does anyone understand what is about to happen?

• Language: English
• Publisher: D. E. Harrison
• Release date: Aug 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463950777

D. E. Harrison

I am trained as a theoretical mathematician. I am an emeritus member of the American Mathematical Society for fifty odd years. I have lived in Seattle since 1967. I starting writing fiction after writing a family history.

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Asteroid Belt

By D. E. Harrison

Copyright 2010 by D. E. Harrison

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 The Start

Chapter 2 Good News, Maybe

Chapter 3 The Feasting Begins

Chapter 4 The Error is too Large to Ignore

Chapter 5 The New location

Chapter 6 The Counters

Chapter 7 CT goes Home

Chapter 8 The Cheerios Box Bottom Lid

Chapter 9 The Work Starts

Chapter 10 The Counters now read one month, one week, six days

Chapter 11 Time is Short

Chapter 12 The Final Count Down.

Chapter 13 The End

Chapter The 14 Very End

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Chapter 1 The Start

In 2032, the detail mapping of the asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter is finally going to be completed for every object over 1/2 mile in diameter. The slow process is sped up greatly by the many computers linked together.

Small variations in their orbits are used to project their closest neighbors. From there all orbits are updated, verified and new objects projected. Only one sighting in 1000 is verified by an actual sighting. So far, the visual sightings are only confirming their best estimate.

Then one night, the visual sighting does not happen.

Dr. Purdy is brought from his warm office to the main telescope, Sorry Dr., I have checked the numbers twice, there is no object within the error window to account for the orbits we have verified.

Dr. Purdy does not look surprised, We do have errors, even if we did not want to admit it. But there will be several situations where we could have gone wrong. We have confirmed over 10,000 objects. Some people would just adjust their charts and move on. Since this is the first one that the search did not find, we need to figure out and understand what went wrong. No one has had the chance to do so, you will be the first.

For the rest of the night Dr. Purdy and his assistant, Dr, London verifies the last 20 orbits with their calculations and then visually verifies all 20 objects. Dr. London is the poster boy for a post-doc. He has a crew cut with full black bread, large rim glasses and in the observatory wears six layers of clothes. Otherwise, he is in a faded pair of Bermuda shorts, which do nothing for his hairy, spidery legs. Everyone calls him London.

London takes the sightings one after another and automatically records their orbits. He often leaves a note for the programmer to write a small program to determine how far off their last sighting was. It will give them a new error window to find this last unseen wander.

The programmer is a perky red head who codes to relax. She likes nothing better than pointing a 10,000,000 Pounds Sterling scope to what they think might be out there.

She is on the team because of her data reduction skills, but she just as easily could have been Dr. Purdy’s assistant or even running the entire show. But that takes skills she does not want to display, or she might end up pushing paper.

Everyone calls her CT; she still does not fully understand that logic. Now if she had green hair she would understand. She is not the poster girl for a programmer. Her deep auburn hair frames a milk skin face with very few freckles. Her deep emerald eyes only add to the overall effect.

She paid her way through school by dancing near Big Ben. Her stage name soon became ‘Don’t touch’; those that did not pay heed were carried out and most ended up in Casualty. Her kick was higher than a Broadway Rockett and just as accurate. She could make 10 times the amount dancing than she is making on this research project.

At work in the observatory, she wears a blouse, blue jeans, bobby socks and loafers. She carries a small green hand purse that defies how much she can stuff into it.

Her weird work hours, being up all-night and sleeping all day, do not lend itself to much of a social life. She carries a little of the Cockney accent but when excited may drop into some very thick Cockney.

She proposed the current project by writing all the programs to conduct the search. She published