NASA

Materials of life

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It comes as an exhaustive relief that making the voyage to Mars is not only my Daisy List*.

David Bowman‘s image of a Damsel Fly

[Written weeks ago under a baby blue sky, no vapour trails but cartoon clouds on the warmest day of the year.]

Sitting by a well stocked stretch of water with bees bobbing into every blackberry bud and the blue haze of damsel- & dragonflys billowing with each turn of a page, birds engaging in genial chatter and, too early in the day to bother much about anything, the geese resisting all inclination to honk their presence. This deep, restorative peace is almost overwhelming.

Yet, Life teams and pulses all around.

Contrast the earnestly eerie, empty silence of Mars?

NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s images which its roving lander Perseverance wafts across the 217 million miles separating the planets in 19 minutes (tiens, eh ben dit donc), make me weep.

Life, teaming gush of unending cascade, seems tangibly absent in desolation of shattering void.

If you squint amid the Red Planet’s ochre vibrations, are you also shaken by what absence-of-life looks like? No blue sky, no pulsing verdance, neither dawns nor dusks, never blossoms in blooms or birds in song. Nor can imagination, kindness, joy or wonder penetrate the dense, unyielding vacuum.

Exploration is in our DNA, the bold will go and stretch further filigrees of enquiry. Thank goodness their bravery allows me to remain here to gaze through the green at crushingly exquisite glory of this planet.

It makes me so thankful for the barely credible co-incidence that perfect distance from our star enables dark matter to manifest itself materially as Life: by which I mean consciousness.

* dismal expression of Bucket List more cheerfully captured as Daisy List.

madeleinebaird.com/blogos

Putting things in perspective

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© Yiannis Efremidis                                   Analemma: Clock time vs Solar time an everlasting tag of war! After 18 months the Avlaki Analemma project became a reality. Only six of the 52 weekly images were lost due to inclement weather, Yiannis took 46 successful pics through the year.       Solar Analemma is the figure-8 pattern that shows the Sun’s path in the sky at the same time of the day throughout a year at a specific location on Earth. The dots in the sky are the Sun’s center from photos taken at 8:45 a.m. & 9:45 a.m. according to daylight saving time, roughly every week from March 26, 2017 to March 25, 2018. Location: Avlaki Beach, Attica – Greece

This is written while supine and in the shade. Sometimes the crushing, unimaginable scale and voluptuous beauty of creation becomes overwhelming, possible to approach only as a fragment of oneself so as to lessen the searing scorchment of understanding.

Hence, we start with Yiannis Efremidis calming tracerie above, in preparation for what yodels beyond our solar system. The languid grace of Infinity’s symbolic never-endingness is but a glimpse of how all that is, ever was.

© NASA                  You’re looking across 11 billion years of cosmic spacetime.                                                                                                                                          Scientists have released the largest ever three-dimensional map of the universe, proving that it is basically flat.
“We know both the ancient history of the universe and its recent expansion history fairly well, but there’s a troublesome gap in the middle 11 billion years,” said Dr Kyle Dawson, cosmologist at the University of Utah, who led the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) team which worked for the past five years to fill in that gap.” (appropriately, quoted from Sky News)

Would that we might observe our gorgeous planet in the context of the space – the yonder – it occupies and spend more time glorifying its wonders than in wrestling down myriad, earth-bound trivialities.

Amid such ventilating wonder, thankfulness for our surroundings and those who help us understand it better is surely a universe of blessing?

madeleinebaird.com/blogos

Cassini’s final fling

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© NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute                                                     Taken: Jul. 16, 2017 4:33 PM  Received: Jul. 17, 2017 4:03 PM
The camera pointing toward Saturn, image taken using MT2 & CL2 filters. Image has not been validated or calibrated. A validated/calibrated image will be archived with the NASA Planetary Data System.

Having oft writ and more frequently reflected on the exquisite glory of the universe, one of the chief conduits to images of its wonders dives into oblivion on Friday, Fifteenth September.

The Cassini Space probe, ESA, ISA & NASA’s lovechild, has touched, tasted, seen and inhaled Saturn and its moons Titan and Enceladus since 2004. Extended twice, this twenty year lonely voyage, whose costs must surely be seen as having been maximally recouped, has doubtless given the European, Italian and North American space agencies dividends beyond wildest expectation.

What has it given the rest of us?

What it means to dream, to wonder, to ignite imaginings: these are not ephemeral intangibles but sparks that blaze thinking into strides of endeavour and achievement.

I’m guessing Captain Bligh would have no more an understanding of GPS as he sat, soggily, in his skiff in the middle of the Pacific than we do of … teleportation? functional telepathy? warp-factor motion? universal kindfulness? everyday listening skills?

Playing with unimaginable concepts – as a child with a cardboard tube – gives them a concrete reality, somehow. As we heartily congratulate the astrophysicists on their profound achievement, let unbounded joy fertilize wonder such as to spark gorgeous revelation amid our own realm.

Titan, which has provided gravitational pull for Cassini, and Enceladus snuggling up

Cassini’s Endex Schedule, 15.ix.17 – Orbit 293

Fly-by altitude at 111,000 km/69,000 mi. of moon Janus

Fly-by (alt = 91,000 km/57,000 mi.) of moon Pan

Fly-by (alt = 86,000 km/53,000 mi.) of moon Pandora

Fly-by (alt = 92,000 km/57,000 mi.) of moon Epimetheus

End of mission, atmospheric entry into Saturn.

Where ghosts cast shadows

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© NASA On Mars, as snapped by the splendid Opportunity lander

It strikes me heroic as only heroic can be that the splendid wee Mars lander, Opportunity, bimbles off into the wide yonder, yodelling back across 33.9 million miles (that’s on a close day) images of unearthly clarity.

NASA, obviously knowing of what it speaks, describes the ghost as a Dust storm. While ghosts are not generally attributed with shadows, neither are mini-cyclones. Modal logic would allow that if one, then the other: no?

Thus, let imagination ricochet from every shiny facet of cheerful  wonder on a solitary, shuffling object – which I’m fairly sure chats to itself as merrily as R2-D2 – and allows us to observe that which cannot be seen, a ghost beyond the machine.