We are introduced to Sandra Elias and Dr. Browne in 02.120 in the gallery of a flight-control room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They are described as a “reporter” and “older man” respectively and in the next paragraph, Dr. Browne is introduced as the head of Planetary Sciences for NASA.

The two only appear in section 10 (02.117–02.163).

The name “Browne” appears 10 times. Sandra Elias calls him “Dr. Browne” twice and the narrator calls him that once. In the 7 other occurrences, the narrator just calls him “Browne”.

Neither “Sandra” nor “Elias” are repeated after her initial introduction. For the rest of the section, she is referred to as the “reporter” (9 times).

Dr. Browne and Sandra Elias are both said to clear their throats. Other characters that clear their throats include Dimitri, Justice Spencer, Grace (three times) and Lokken (three times).

Dr. Browne’s direct speech consists of 20 quoted passages, 340 tokens, and 186 unique words. He is the only character to say the words ‘onboard’, ‘magnified’, ‘received’, ‘inserted’, or ‘telemetry’ and the only person other than the narrator to use the words ‘widest’, ‘batch’, ‘finishes’, ‘magnification’, ‘interplanetary’, ‘cloud’, ‘confirmation’, ‘external’, or ‘window’.

Sandra Elias’s direct speech consists of 18 quoted passages, 177 tokens, and 106 unique words. She is the only characters to say the words ‘sciences’, ‘spirits’, ‘Pasadena’, ‘spanning’, ‘JPL’, ‘apologize’, ‘Elias’, ‘Sandra’, or ‘California’ and the only person other than the narrator to use the words ‘arc’, ‘microbes’, ‘timing’, ‘planetary’, ‘planning’ or ‘Browne’.