It shouldn’t have been difficult for Endeavor’s astronauts to obtain preliminary data, since an astronomer and a space physicist were on board and had all the necessary equipment available and at their disposal, including the ISS, to conduct observations; however, their momentary panic had nearly sent the orbiter to its doom. The ISS was a fully-equipped observation platform, but its orbit was not conducive to observing an object situated 450 kilometers above the North Pole nearly perpendicular to the Earth’s axis. Endeavor’s orbit sent it over the poles so it could carry out observations of the ozone holes; at a height of 280 kilometers, it was flying right between the Earth and the mirror.

Flying with an Earth on either side was nightmarish, like speeding along a canyon with blue cliffs towering above them. The pilot insisted it was a mirage, like the spatial disorientation he had experienced twice during his three thousand hours in a fighter jet, but the commander was convinced there really were two Earths. He ordered their orbit adjusted to compensate for the gravitational pull of the second one, but the astronomer stopped him in time. Once they got over their initial shock and learned from observations of the shuttle’s orbit that one of the two Earths had no mass, they let out a sigh of relief: if they had made the compensational adjustments, Endeavor would be nothing more than a shooting star over the North Pole.

The astronauts carefully observed the massless Earth. Visual inspection indicated the orbiter was much farther away from it, but its North Pole seemed little different from that of the nearer Earth, if not entirely identical. They saw laser beams emitting from both North Poles, two long, dark red snakes twisting slowly in identical shapes at identical positions. Eventually they discovered one thing that the nearer Earth did not have: an object in flight above the massless Earth. Visually they judged it to be in an orbit roughly three hundred kilometers above its surface, but when they attempted to probe its orbit more precisely using shipboard radar, the radar seemed to bounce back from a solid wall a hundred-odd kilometers away. The massless Earth and the flying object were on the opposite side of that wall. Observing the object through the cockpit window using high-powered binoculars, the commander saw another space shuttle flying in low orbit over the frozen Arctic ice pack like a moth crawling along a blue striped wall. There was a figure behind that shuttle’s cockpit window, looking through binoculars. The commander waved, and the figure waved at the same time.

And so they discovered the mirror.

They altered course to draw closer to the mirror. At a distance of three kilometers, the astronauts could see clearly Endeavor’s reflection six kilometers away, the glow of its aft engines lending it the form of a creeping firefly.