Technological power starts with upgrading lenses.

Chapter 422 Lucy is missing

20 seconds, 60 seconds, 5 minutes, 10 minutes...

As time passed, Kang Chi, staring at the numbers on the screen, was hypnotized.

When he woke up, an hour had passed. The test program was still running, and the quantum lifespan displayed on it had soared to 2.3 million!
Judging from the current results, as long as Kang Chi analyzes the new technology and successfully finds new elements, the quantum chips produced in the future will not only have a greatly improved lifespan, but also a greatly reduced size. The most important thing is that the cost of use may be lower than electromagnetic communication!
After all, electromagnetic communication requires the construction of a large number of satellites and base stations, and the laying of countless cables.

Quantum communication only needs to establish one or a few data transfer centers to connect to terminals anywhere. Even if the terminal is locked in an iron box several meters thick, the signal is still good.

At the same time, the data transfer center can ignore geographical restrictions and be built wherever it wants.

The current military data transfer center is located in the underground nuclear defense facility of the Pingfeng Mountain Base, ensuring the security and stability of communications.

……

San Antonio, Texas, USA.

In stark contrast to Kang Chi's excitement, the staff of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) were all worried at this time.

It’s not because Country M finally gave in, but because their Lucy is missing!

'Lucy' is a deep space exploration project led by the Southwest Research Institute. This mission deepens humanity's understanding of the evolution of the solar system by closely studying the remains of the birth of planets - the main asteroid belt and Jupiter's Trojan asteroids.

At the same time, this is also the first time that humans have explored Trojan asteroids, which is of great significance.

In October 2021, the Atlas 10 rocket carrying the Lucy probe was successfully launched into space, and Lucy officially began its 5-year interstellar journey.

During this long journey, Lucy will first go to the Sun-Jupiter Lagrange L4 region, and in the process will first visit an asteroid in the main asteroid belt, and then visit four Trojan asteroids in the Sun-Jupiter L4 region.
It will then fly back to Earth, using the Earth's gravitational slingshot effect to help it fly to the Sun-Murphy Lagrange L5 region and reach the end of its journey: a pair of binary asteroids.

In April 2025, Lucy successfully flew close to a C-type asteroid named 4-Donald Johanson, which is located in the main asteroid belt and has a diameter of about four kilometers.

Lucy will then continue to fly towards the Sun-Jupiter L4 region and is expected to reach its second target: 2027-Eurybates asteroid in August 8.

But halfway through the trip from Donald Johanson to Eurybates, Lucy suddenly lost contact!
It has been 116 hours since Lucy lost contact. During this period, the Lucy team has been making various attempts, but still has not been able to receive any signal from Lucy.
Project manager Jay Rosales finally had no choice but to submit a missing report to NASA and apply for the James Webb Space Telescope to search the missing area.
Unfortunately, the James Webb Space Telescope also failed to find any trace of Lucy.

NASA immediately set up a technical investigation team to find out whether the cause of the project failure was human technical oversight or unexpected factors, and to evaluate whether it was necessary to announce the news of Lucy's disappearance to the outside world.

Today is the day the investigation team arrived at the Southwest Research Institute, and project manager Jay Rosales and track designer Stanislav Morrow became their first subjects of questioning.

"Have you found out why Lucy disappeared?"

"It's not certain yet, but according to the flight data before Lucy lost contact, it suddenly deviated from its orbit during flight, and then Lucy activated the orbital automatic correction program, but the automatic correction program not only failed to save it, but also caused the fuel to be quickly consumed, and eventually lost contact." Jay explained helplessly.
"As you know, given Lucy's current distance from the Earth, it takes about 55 minutes for the signal to be transmitted back. So when we received the data that Lucy had deviated from its orbit, it had actually happened 55 minutes ago. All we could do was watch it lose contact..." The head of the investigation team, Holka Van Dijk, nodded and asked, "What do you think about the reason why Lucy suddenly deviated from its orbit?"

"Weird!"

"Weird?"

"Yes, very weird!"

Stanislav Morrow, the orbit designer who was being investigated in the next room, showed a drawing of Lucy's orbit design, pointed to the place where the contact was lost and said, "We analyzed the abnormal data after Lucy deviated from the orbit and found that Lucy seemed to be pulled over by the gravity of a celestial body, but in fact this place is empty and there is nothing."

"How can you be sure there's nothing there?"

"It's very simple. An object that can capture Lucy must be very large in size and mass. Even if Lucy flies very close to it to maximize its gravity, its size must be larger than a large asteroid like Vesta. But if there really is such a large asteroid there, it is impossible that it has not been discovered so far. You have also used the James Webb Space Telescope to search there, but you didn't find anything, right?"

Deputy team leader George Rice frowned and thought for a moment, not knowing what other questions to ask.

This is really too contradictory and weird...

"Is there a possibility that... there is actually a very small black hole out there that our telescopes can't even see?"

“Black hole?” Tanislav sneered, “Is there no one in NASA now? You let a newbie with no astronomical knowledge join the investigation team? Please first check the cause of the black hole. Black holes absolutely cannot appear in the solar system. Are they caused by the death of stars, the collision of stars, or the collision of neutron stars? If these things happened in the solar system, all of us would have gone to see God long ago!”

Tanislav's merciless ridicule made Georgiou feel embarrassed, and he had to end the conversation with some dissatisfaction.

On the other side, after Holka van Dijk had a general understanding of the situation, he ended the conversation and began to discuss the results of the first round of talks with Georgiou.

"There are so many contradictions in their statements. I think there must be something wrong here." Georgiou said with certainty. "If we follow their analysis, then Lucy must have encountered a ghost. I can't believe that such unscientific statements were made by the two main persons in charge of the Lucy Project!"

"Rather than believe their lies, I would rather believe that it was their fault that caused Lucy's program to malfunction or the structural design to be flawed, but they were afraid of taking responsibility and deliberately concealed it from us."

Holka just smiled and said, "NASA sent us here to find out whether it was a program failure or a design flaw. How about you take charge of these technical investigations?"

"Uh……"

George's expression suddenly froze.

He is an agent who has no knowledge of technology at all, and you ask him to investigate the technical problems of a space project?
Isn't this meant to embarrass him?

(End of this chapter)