But a new measurement had to be ordered and put in the experiment cycle. It was more than three months of merely waiting for his turn at the telescope. When the time came and the system had been set up to make new Martian surface albedo measurements, Jack logged on to the telescope control page and took over the system; he could manage the telescope at the Lowell Observatory from his office at Johns Hopkins University via the Internet.

The measurement involved taking several exposures over several hours each and the need for multiple measurements required several nights of telescope time. Jack had lost about a week of sleep by the time the final data was crunched through his filtering algorithms and massaged into a form that made sense to the human eye.

As the algorithm ground to a halt, the computer pinged to alert that it had completed processing the data. The ping startled Jack awake. The graph that was displayed on the screen really woke him up.

“Dr. Simms! Dr. Simms!” Jack screamed as he burst into the rotund little professor’s office. “It’s real! The reflectance albedo of Mars has changed in the past year!”

“Calm down, Mr. Hamilton, and let me see what you have there.” Dr. Simms nodded for the graduate student to sit as he took the stack of printouts from him. The graph on the top page showed the reflectance of Mars as of the previous year in black and the most recent measurement in red. The red and black curves were clearly different in both shape and magnitude.

“You see what I mean? The planet is, well, brighter! And it has different compounds on the surface than before.” Jack rose from his seat, leaned over his advisor’s desk and tapped his finger on the red curve.

“You’re certain this data is correct?” Dr. Simms asked, stroking his beard as he pondered the graph. “You sure Sandi isn’t just playing a trick on you of some sort? She’s been known to do that in the past. This looks… This can’t be! It’s either the most remarkable data in history or… but that’s the spectrum of… This can’t be right!” he said as he grabbed a materials reference book from his shelves.