“The data from the Hubble Telescope run we made last month on the Martian surface albedo doesn’t match the data we took last year,” Jack said, furrowing his brow. He had hopes of completing his dissertation with this run of data, but for some reason the albedo he measured this year with the aging space telescope was completely out of synch with last year’s data. Furthermore, it didn’t match in very odd ways. If he had tainted the data some way or if the Hubble was failing again, all his four years of research could be wasted — or at least delayed another year or two. And damnit, Jack was ready to graduate and start making money. As much as an astronomer ever made, anyway.

“Let’s not be rash, Jack.” Dr. Simms continued scanning the spectral graphs in the stack of printouts. “I know the Earth-based data won’t be as defined as this, but have you considered getting Sandi over at Flagstaff to make a measurement for you? At least then we would have something to compare the Hubble data to. You could implement that filtering technique of yours to clean it up some.”

“Well, I hadn’t thought of Sandi,” Jack admitted. “But I did try it with my sixteen-inch setup at home. There just isn’t enough aperture for the measurement. I’ll call Sandi and see if she can help me out.”

“Who knows, Jack, they may already have the data for some other measurement. Don’t give up yet.” Simms tapped one of the figures and chuckled, “But I don’t think this can be right. That is a lot of silicon. It looks like a computer factory.”

It had taken Jack about four months to collect all of the data he needed. Fortunately, Dr. Sandi Thiaput at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, had made several measurements of the Martian albedo for another project the previous year and Sandi e-mailed the raw and post-processed data to him.