"Anyhow, some sources send out bursts of gamma rays, sometimes for hours, sometimes minutes, usually just seconds. This satellite detects and analyzes the radiation. It has a small telescope, essentially a fast wide-angle lens, that covers the whole sky every two seconds. If it detects a gamma-ray burst, the bigger telescope can be on it in about a second."
"Does it have any practical applications?"
"One never knows, but I doubt it. Except that if the Sun ever did that, it would fry everyone on the daytime side of the planet. It would be nice to have a few hours' warning."
"Do you have a picture of the satellite?"
"Sure." She pushed the button. "Find GRB hyphen one comma artist's conception." A dramatic holo of the satellite appeared, silhouetted against the sun peeking crimson from behind the curve of the Earth. Dan pointed at it and the big camera, which had been tight on Bell, turned around and got a shot of the wallscreen.
"That's pretty but falsado," she said. "GRB-1 's up in geosynchronous orbit; the Earth's just a big ball that gets in the way."
"So what's this anomaly? I mean, what does the word mean?"
"It means something unexpected, a mystery. In this case, we recorded the gamma ray burst, but when the computer tried to find out what source it was, there was no object there, in previous records. I mean down to twenty-fifth magnitude, which is about as faint as they get.
"That was the first anomaly, which was interesting. The second was startling. Whenever we get a burst that's more than a few seconds long, we send out a request to the Japanese gamma-ray observatory on the Moon, for backup data. Their detector's more powerful. It found the burst but said that
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