Title: Philae
Summary: Team Flash celebrates the comet landing by being complete science nerds
Set between 1x05 Plastique and 1x06 The Flash is Born. Specifically, set November 12, 2014
Dedicated to Science. So much science-love in this
07:55:43 Central Standard Time
Barry arrives early at S.T.A.R. Labs. He might have arrived even earlier, since he'd woken up around 5 in the morning and been unable to fall back asleep due to overwhelming anticipation, but good manners won out in the end. He didn't think the others would appreciate such an early morning wake-up call, and hanging out at the lab alone didn't sound very appealing.
Today, if all goes well, history is going to be made.
He's already arranged to have the day off work, to be better able to appreciate the moment and spend it with his team (he has a team!), who won't think the only Rosetta of significance is a carved piece of granite (to be fair, the Rosetta Stone is also awesome and fantastic, and the namesake of the spacecraft, but today it's the spacecraft Barry's really interested in).
Early this morning the Philae lander was launched from the Rosetta probe above comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, armed with two landing anchors (harpoons!) and as much sensory and analytical equipment its scientists could pack into its tiny one-cubic-meter chassis.
08:01:06 CST [1.5 hours until landing]
He realizes too late that he doesn't have a way to get into the lab, having left his key card inside the previous day, so he's waiting in the parking garage, running laps around the empty space when Wells is the next to arrive.
He waits patiently for Wells to finish disengaging his chair from its spot in front of the modified steering column and back it down the automated ramp, and by 'patiently' he means 'zipping from side to side,' because cellphone signal is a crapshoot in the cement cave that is the garage, and what if there's been news? There's less than two hours left until the landing!
08:05:37 CST [1.5 hours until landing]
Caitlin is the last to arrive (now they can get this party started!)
They take advantage of the multiple display screens in the Cortex to bring up the relevant media feeds: a live webcast from the European Space Agency's mission control in Germany; live-updating blogs from world news sites; the pertinent Twitter feeds - from Philae, from ESA Operations, from #CometLanding; Randal Munroe's excellent webcomic; and the first season of Star Trek (original series) queued up and ready to boldly go on the far right screen.
08:20:18 CST [1 hour 15 minutes until landing]
Armed robbery at a gas station.
At 8:20 in the morning, really?
(Argh, criminals)
08:23:15 CST [1 hour 15 minutes until landing]
Coffee, need coffee
Barry can now confirm that 8:20 in the morning is much too early to attempt armed robbery (as if there was ever even very much cash in a register at this time), and, also, it is too early to be running around stopping idiotic armed robbers. It took him over two minutes to get there and resolve the situation!
Hence: coffee
(Since he's now out and about, he might as well pick up extra coffees for the others)
08:42:42 CST [55 minutes until landing]
In the restless pauses between news updates, Barry trains his coordination and accelerated depth perception. In other words, Cisco and Caitlin flick pieces of popcorn around the room for Barry to catch in his mouth. Dr. Wells comes up with the idea to make popcorn launchers out of rubber bands, and the training exercise really takes off from there.
09:00:21 CST [35 minutes until landing]
Philae is thirty-five minutes away from landfall, and the news will reach the Earth twenty-eight minutes after that (Deep Space is deep). No amount of cajoling or wheedling will get Dr. Wells to share more than generalities about his memories of the first Apollo mission (One giant leap for Mankind!), or any of the other lunar missions.
He does get more engaged in a hypothetical discussion of how to build a station on the moon.
Which. Is just. (he has no words)...
The Harrison Wells is giving a private lecture on moon colonies, and Barry can scarcely believe this is his life now.
09:16:03 CST [20 minutes until landing]
Four-alarm fire at a clothing boutique.
No casualties, thank goodness.
(He'll leave it to the fire marshal to figure out how that one got started; it doesn't make much sense to him)
09:20:52 CST [15 minutes until landing]
Somehow (Barry can't remember how), the conversation turns to African migratory locusts, and then Cisco asks about forensic entomology (Barry's knowledge is piecemeal; the CCPD doesn't have an entomologist on staff, so they have to send their maggots to a lab in St. Louis), which leads to carcass beetles, and from there to carrion flowers (because, while Barry is not a trained entomologist, he's nevertheless intensely curious, and carrion flowers are neat). And the mimicry of those plants reminds Caitlin of her 6th grade science project, and that leads to a discussion of everyone's science project, ever, and Barry has never felt such a sense of belonging before.
09:24:47 CST [10 minutes until landing]
The last ten minutes until the landing are spent constantly refreshing pages, seeking every scrap of news available.
(On the Enterprise, Dr. McCoy reveals that there is no trace of salt - no trace at all - in the body they recovered from planet M-100-13)
09:36:02 CST [Landing?]
Yes or no. There's nothing to do now but wait (so, no different from the rest of their day, really), wait for the news to come.
Somehow, that the possibility of success exists now, in this moment, while a moment ago it was merely a probability, feels enormous.
Did we put a lander on a comet? Yes or no?
Barry looks up at the ceiling and imagines he can strip away the roof and see the sky, the stars. He imagines the incredible distance between himself on Earth and Philae on 67P. He can't hold the distance in his head; it's too big. (Also, maybe it's in the other direction, and he should be looking towards his feet).
Somewhere out there, a journey of ten years through the solar system will have come to an end, for better or for worse.
(He remembers a story from his childhood, about a prince from asteroid B-612)
[Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: is it yes or no? Has the sheep eaten the flower? And you will see how everything changes . . .]
09:40:12 CST [Time until confirmation: 25 minutes]
There's only so much relentless refreshing a person can do in one day, so while they keep one eye out for breaking news, they eventually return to amusing diversions to keep themselves occupied.
Cisco brings out a bag of tootsie pops and, with Barry's super-speed (and super-metabolism, thank god), they settle once and for all how many licks it takes to get to the center. (341, plus or minus 12.7 standard deviations) (and ugh, a statistically significant sample size of tootsie pops is way too many tootsie pops - Barry doesn't even want to look at the pile of paper stems left behind).
09:51:35 CST [Time until confirmation: 15 minutes]
Barry's sugar rush is so fleeting, he wonders if anyone else even noticed it
10:01:24 CST [Time until confirmation: 5 minutes]
They re-enact the landing (can you re-enact something that is currently happening/already happened/will happen? - lag time sucks for verb tense), which primarily consists of Barry and Cisco throwing twizzler-harpoons at each other from across the room (and marveling at the skill it takes to make a soft landing on a 2.5-mile-wide comet travelling 83,000 miles per hour, 317 million miles away).
10:07:28 CST [Landed!]
YEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
10:09:35 CST [Landing confirmed]
Barry's phone rings; it's Felicity. "We landed on a comet!" he exclaims in place of a more typical greeting.
"Oh, thank god!" Her answer is equally atypical, but the story quickly becomes clear; evidently, no-one in Starling City is properly appreciative at 8 o'clock in the morning about the History That Just Happened, Seriously, That Programming Was Awesome (especially those that are still asleep due to generally-nocturnal vigilante habits - the clear exception being Ray Palmer, who is enthusiastic to the point of being completely unavailable, tied-up as he is in conference calls and hammering out the details of ways to improve nitrogen thrusters).
Caitlin is making gestures towards his phone and Cisco is hanging on to every word, so Barry asks if Felicity wants to switch to Skype instead; they pull up the video chat on the nearest monitor, the one with the microphone, and everyone basks in the mutual appreciation of human ingenuity and the incredible feats mankind can achieve. More than that, this will be an incredible opportunity to learn, will be so much more than sticking a metaphorical flag in a piece of space rock. Because that space rock is debris left over from the formation of the solar system five billion years ago.
And how cool is that?
10:43:10 CST
So, since Barry's already taken time off from his day job (and he's not entirely sure what Cisco and Caitlin and Dr. Wells actually do when he's not around), it only makes sense to keep the party going. Especially now that they've got actual, confirmed good news to celebrate.
They bring the ping-pong table back. They've yet to devise a fair and balanced handicap for Barry; early experiments with blindfolds were a resounding failure, but requiring Barry to play left-handed while standing on one leg shows promise (in that he only wins by a six-point margin, instead of his typical lockout games).
11:03:36 CST
Word just came in - harpoons definitely did not deploy. Aw, man!
11:04:09 CST
Dr. Wells starts making pointed comments that, as fun as this all is, perhaps Barry could get a little speed training done before lunch.
And it is a good idea, until Cisco, appointing himself Barry's 'motivational coach', stands in front of him making increasingly ridic faces until, laughing, Barry falls off the back of the treadmill.
Caitlin, with a frosty glare, sends them both down to the storeroom to get replacement boxes. But seeing all the packing peanuts scattered around gives Barry ideas, so they build forts out of the new boxes and bust out the Nerf guns - Cisco is amazing-prepared for any eventuality, it's awesome - and they even manage to convince Caitlin to take part.
(Dr. Wells mostly just gives up on getting anything productive done today)
11:58:02 CST
By noon, their competitive tendencies have been formalized into an official scoreboard, keeping a running 'points' tally on a whiteboard that they wheeled in from a disused conference room.
(Dr. Well's paper airplane scores the highest on both aesthetics and functionality, with its unique, almost bat-like design.
Meanwhile, Barry wins gold in the Who Can Name More First-Generation Pokemon competition. Caitlin scores points for being able to name the most Nobel laureates, while Wells gets bonus points for having met the most laureates.
Cisco wins at Jenga. Three times.)
12:06:45 CST
oooh, pictures from Rosetta!
12:22 CST
Time for Tactical Environmental Assessment with Respect to Hostiles (a.k.a. hide-and-seek), with Wells on the comms to announce any new updates immediately, seriously, the second they happen, this information is critical.
Caitlin pwns everybody.
1:08 pm
Chalupas!
1:19 pm
Airplane-on-a-treadmill argument begins
1:40 pm
Airplane-on-a-treadmill argument is forced to conclude with no clear winner
1:58 CST / 7:58 UTC
The final message from ESA mentions the possibility of having landed twice (Philae bounced, in other words). They thank everyone for their support, and promise a status update tomorrow, when Rosetta re-establishes contact with Philae after dipping below the horizon of the comet.
All in all, a pretty fantastic day
(in the end, the points don't matter)
A/N: So, pretty much my Ode to the Spirit of Intrepid Exploring and Also Nerdly Pursuits :D
Because if I had free run of an advanced scientific lab with no clearly defined long-term projects, there would be so many novel forms of ridiculousness we'd be able to patent them and secure a new source of income.
In other news, I almost forgot to convert EST of xkcd's frame-by-frame breakdown to Central Time. And then I forgot to take Daylight Savings Time into account, converting between UCT (Coordinated Universal Time) and CST, since there was a switch between now and November. Really screwed with my timeline, which is why it all sorts of drifts away after twelve o'clock.
For the purposes of this fic, I continue to map Starling City to somewhere on the west coast, since they were able to reach Lian Yu from the wreck of the Queen's Gambit, and it seems unlikely to me that they would have started on the east coast and then gone all the way around to take the Panama canal to the Pacific Ocean for a pleasure cruise, when at that point the Bahamas would have been much closer.
This means converting to Pacific Standard Time, two hours behind Barry in Central City. Just thought I'd clear that up. (unless I made it more muddles? if so: whoops)
I grabbed the tootsie pop lick number from a study by Purdue University, in which they built a 'licking machine' to test the age-old question (I completely made up the SD, though). They also had twenty volunteers assume the challenge, and got a much lower result - 252 licks averaged (it is reportedly very difficult to resist biting). The University of Michigan, Swarthemore Junior High School, and likely others have also conducted experiments, and the results vary a lot - the range of averages is something like 140 to 410, and more recently scientists at New York University created a fluid mechanics model that calculated 1000 licks.
(Way back when, when the treadmill first appeared, I got to thinking about treadmills as they relate to faster-than-light travel, and how subjective frame-of-reference is. My knee-jerk reaction was that, if Barry needed to approach light-speed in order to time travel, how could this happen on a stationary treadmill? Then I realized, no, wait, relativity (the whole reason we tie speed and time travel together at all). Which means that Barry-on-a-treadmill is only stationary compared to the surface of the Earth, and he could be traveling at light-speed relative to the surface of the treadmill. Which, since it's a treadmill, the underside of the belt will also be travelling at light-speed relative to the surface of the Earth, but in the opposite direction... at which point my understanding of physics fails to cough up any sort of conclusion (was there even a question?))