Reborn in 2011, I am the chief designer of aerospace.

Chapter 78: Caught the Tail of the Forbes

Quiet.

Followed by.

A stone stirred up a thousand waves.

Chang Jian's words left everyone stunned for a few seconds, then instantly erupted into a frenzy.

"Holy crap, really? How did you find out?"

"Everyone searched tirelessly for over a month, from dawn till dusk, without any leads. Old Chang, you've done a fantastic job!"

"Shh, everyone be quiet. Let Lao Chang tell us what's going on—"

Seeing the screen filled with messages, Song Xingye manually muted them before he finally felt some peace and quiet.

"Old Chang, tell me, what discoveries have been made at the Purple Mountain Observatory?"

So Chang Jianxing began to recount the whole story.

It turns out that after receiving the latest predicted coordinates from Chang Jian, the friend from Zijin Mountain, as usual, set up an optical telescope and a radio telescope with the mindset of "accompanying the prince in his studies".

For more than a month, countless observations have ended in failure.

However, it wasn't entirely fruitless; at least each failure meant that the model had ruled out an incorrect large elliptical orbit.

But today, a miracle happened.

After a three-hour exposure, the friend noticed something unusual at the edge of the noisy film.

As he zoomed in and zoomed in again, until his eyes were almost touching the screen, he saw a tiny, faint scratch that lasted only 0.5 seconds!

That's not noise, but the light and shadow left by a high-speed man-made object in space.

After being missing for several weeks, the Forbes hull has finally revealed its tail for the first time!

Song Xingye felt his blood boiling, which even diluted the chill in the room.

He quickly instructed, "Immediately use Doppler shift to deduce the velocity and trajectory of the Phobos, and correct the trajectory model! Narrow down the search area!"

"yes!"

Throwing down his phone, Song Xingye abruptly threw off the covers and hurriedly left the dormitory.

The wind howled, cutting like a knife.

He didn't even have time to button up his down jacket before braving the cold wind and rushing back to the Baikonur control center.

With a loud "bang!"

Startled, Engineer Chen, who was dozing off at the table, was about to get angry when he saw Song Xingye standing in front of him, his face flushed and panting heavily, his eyes shining brightly.

"Engineer Chen—found!"

Engineer Chen's drowsiness vanished instantly, and he jumped up abruptly. "What did you say? Who found it? How did they find it?!"

Song Xingye, without even catching his breath, quickly recounted the secret team's discovery.

After listening to the report, Engineer Chen remained silent for a full five seconds.

On that weathered face, the expression shifted from surprise to disbelief, and finally to admiration.

He reached out his large hand and patted Song Xingye heavily on the shoulder. "Good lad—you've done a great job this time!"

"I'll report to the Jingzhou Flight Control Center immediately! We need to race against time for the next orbit calculations!"

Soon, everyone on the test team gathered around.

No one expected that a few inexperienced newcomers, with just a few workstations and a privately built physical model, would actually find a needle in a haystack!

While luck certainly played a part, the work done by R Country and Dong Country beforehand was also like finding a needle in a haystack.

Should we try our luck?

That afternoon, Zhang Jingshan and Engineer Chen formally spoke with Song Xingye.

The "underground work" has ended.

The model data from Song Xingye's team was simultaneously uploaded to the Jingzhou Flight Control Center, Chang'an Measurement and Control Center, and Kuaiji Maritime Measurement and Control Department via an encrypted dedicated line.

After waiting for more than a month, this day has finally arrived.

Song Xingye knew that the reason why the Space Force was willing to give the green light to this rudimentary model was that they were truly desperate and had no other choice but to try anything.

On the other hand, this model actually achieved good results, catching the tail of the Forbes.

But this is not enough.

To completely calculate the orbital elements of the Phobos spacecraft and obtain the analytical solution to the Lambert equation, at least two more precise orbital points are needed!

This is known in celestial mechanics as the Gaussian orbit determination method.

On a two-dimensional sheet of paper, two points form a line; in the three-dimensional universe, three points form an orbit.

By focusing on three coordinate points and combining them with the known constraint of Earth's gravitational field, it is easy to derive the conic section of a spacecraft.

With the support of the computing power of the regular army, the results were much more efficient.

The massive amounts of data sent by radio enthusiasts were also being rapidly analyzed by the supercomputer.

During this period, after obtaining the precise location of the Forbes, the prediction model successfully reduced the number of mathematical solutions for the highly elliptical orbit from tens of thousands to several thousand.

The search scope has also been significantly reduced.

However, the frequency of radar and telescope searches has only decreased; the orbital flight period remains unchanged.

We still need to wait patiently, day by day.

That afternoon, Engineer Chen had just finished a meeting with Andrei, the director of the Baikonur Measurement and Control Department, and Dima, the chief engineer of the Lavochkin Design Bureau.

He excitedly brought back a manila file folder.

Seeing his beaming face, Zhang Jingshan quickly asked, "What good thing did you get that makes you so excited?"

As Engineer Chen beckoned Song Xingye over, he explained, "The Russians can't hold on any longer and don't want to waste any more energy searching for detectors. Moscow, Baikonur,..."

Tracking stations in Crimea and the Uzbek highlands must switch focus to ensuring the successful launch of the Soyuz spacecraft.

"TASS has issued a press release stating that, as of the 35th day since its disappearance, the Forbes has still not regained communication, and all known communication modes are unresponsive. The engineering team has assumed the mission failed and has terminated all monitoring —"

As he untied the hemp rope from the file folder, he said, "NASA was also putting pressure on them to prepare for the ground launch as soon as possible. So the Russians simply entrusted the Phobos to us and completely washed their hands of it."

The file folder was opened, revealing a thick stack of Russian documents.

Zhang Jingshan gave a noncommittal snort. "As expected. A single Soyuz flight can earn tens of billions of rubles, enough to build several probes. Of course they wouldn't bother with this pile of scrap metal."

"But we can't let our guard down. We absolutely cannot throw away Firefly 1 until the very last moment!"

Engineer Chen nodded, then turned to look at Song Xingye and the rest of the test team, his eyes burning with determination: "This is the Russians' most prized possession—the original technical documents for the Forbes tracker and communication equipment."

"These cunning fellows, only now are they willing to hand it over."

"You guys need to study this quickly, adjust the current prediction model based on these parameters, and sift through that radio data again—"

Engineer Chen clenched his fist. "A month and a half, tens of terabytes of data, I don't believe it's all just background noise from the universe!"

I refuse to believe that there hasn't even been a single trace of the Forbes!

Next, Song Xingye flipped through the dictionary and carefully studied the information.

Having stayed in Baikonur for so long, his Russian has improved by leaps and bounds, and he even feels that he has never found the English CET-6 exam so easy.

Perhaps it's because I often deal with these Russians.

This tracking and communication system installed on the Phobos probe was named "3aMOK" by the Russians.

Song Xingye called it a "miniature lock".

He compared the information with the data and sketched a simple diagram of the phase-locked loop in his notebook, and marked some basic principles. It's like an old-fashioned wall clock at home, which will become inaccurate after a long time and needs a standard clock to calibrate it.

The principle behind miniature locks is the same.

It can automatically adjust the output signal based on the input signal, so that even if the detector moves only a few centimeters in space, the ground can sense the tiny change in phase.

The most crucial thing is—

Even if the detector loses contact and data transmission is interrupted, as long as the solar panels are still working, the "miniature lock" will continue to emit a simple carrier signal, just like a pacemaker.

Although the power is extremely weak, only a mere 1 milliwatt.

Furthermore, this signal is like a flickering phosphorescent flame in the universe; once the distance exceeds 5000 kilometers, it will be completely submerged in the cosmic noise of the electromagnetic background!

What Song Xingye and his team had to do was to re-process the radio data that had been "washed" before.

The goal is to identify radio waves with phase-locked loop characteristics from this cosmic background noise!

This targeted search makes data cleaning more precise, uncovering previously faint signals that were buried in noise.

This was a long and tedious process. The experimental team and the domestic support team were helping Song Xingye and his team, working day and night to compare the massive amounts of data from the past few weeks.

Although R country and Dong country have also done similar work, their data sources are different from Song Xingye's.

Song Xingye, based on his own predictive model, instructed Zhao Yuehe to send the information about the possible passage of the Forbes at a certain time and place to the radio enthusiast group.

They then mobilized nearby volunteers to drive around with homemade antennas to collect electromagnetic wave data from that period.

Both R Country and Dong Country have gained nothing, so the data collected by Song Xingye is the last remaining hope for Miao Fan.

However, after searching for a week, they still found nothing.

Looking at their increasingly thin team members, Zhang Jingshan and Engineer Chen also felt uncertain.

After all, searching for a probe with a probability of 1 in 590 trillion in the vastness of space is indeed like finding a needle in a haystack.

Maybe I was just lucky last time.

Song Xingye remained calm and composed as always.

He stared at the progress bar on the screen, his fingers tapping the table with considerable patience.

The prediction model has been iterated to the latest version. He asked Qin Rui to add a fast Fourier transform filtering algorithm, which has greatly improved the speed of cleaning up cosmic background noise.

Song Xingye was confident that his approach would be sound.

All that's missing is a little bit of luck.

He believes the Forbes must have appeared in the past few days.

At this moment, Song Xingye's tapping motion suddenly stopped.

He then leaned forward and tapped the keyboard a few times, bringing up a frame of data spectrum that had just flashed by.

In this cosmic background spectrum filled with snowy noise, the large model accurately captured a subtle anomaly.

A very thin, very weak, and inconspicuous spectral line slowly emerged.

The similarity score given by the algorithm is 99.99%!

Song Xingye smiled with delight: "Frequency 8400.125 MHz, after Doppler frequency shift correction, completely erases the characteristics of a phase-locked loop—we've found you again, Forbes!"

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