Cumbrian Sky

WELCOME TO "CARNIVAL OF SPACE" READERS! :-)

As I write this, MESSENGER is screaming towards its long-awaited rendezvous with Mercury, and the countdown clock on the mission website now reads just hours and minutes, not weeks and days. Yes, it’s finally here, “Fly By” day, January 14th, a date spaceflight enthusiasts have had circled in red, or highlighted in fluorescent yellow or green, for months, if not years.

Already it’s been an exciting ride. Even before today we had created folders in the “My Pictures” directories on our computer hard drives and started to fill them with Messenger approach images, animations, pdf brochures and other goodies. Each of the five approach images released over the past week has shown more detail than the previous one – more hints of craters, more hints of details on the smoothly curving limb – and when the fifth and final pre-flyby image appeared on my screen last night I was stunned and thrilled to see a dozen or so craters on Mercury’s swelling crescent. Some familiar, like Matisse and Vivaldi, others unknown to me – for now. I’m sure that in the hours, days and weeks to come I’ll come to know them much more intimately.

But for now everything has gone quiet. Messenger is, right now, closing in on Mercury, but it has entered a period of radio silence with Earth. It’s doing the job it was designed, built and launched for, and talking to us back here on Earth is the last thing on its electronic mind.

When Messenger’s images start to come back, beamed to Earth across millions of miles of space, we’ll see familiar features in more detail than ever before, and look upon new wonders for the first time ever. We’ll see the mighty Caloris Basin in its entirety for the first time, something I’m personally looking forward to greatly. We’ll no doubt see some completely new features that will excite and stun us. But those images won’t reach us – or be shared with us - for some time, and it might be days before we can really begin to glory in the new wonders of that cratered, cracked little world that whirls so giddily around the blazing Sun.

And so, we wait.

Some are a bit put out by this, it has to be said. Used to – and spoiled by? – the features on the Cassini and MER websites, they are frustrated that there’s no similar real-time image gallery on the website for people to see the raw images as they come in. But that can’t be helped, so we’ll just have to be patient this time.

But it strikes me that that waiting links us with the past. Over the centuries, how many thousands or tens of thousands of people gathered on salt-stained quaysides, waiting for sailing ships to come back from their long voyages of exploration? How many armchair explorers stood there, surf and spray stinging their faces, waiting for their first glimpse of a sail on the horizon and felt their hearts race with anticipation? How many people gathered at harbours to wait for Columbus to return from his heroic expeditions and describe what he had seen and done? How many people waited impatiently for Drake and Cook to step ashore and show the drawings, maps and charts they had made during their travels?

That’s just what we’re doing today, as we wait for Messenger’s pictures to come back, but in 2008 the distant horizon is our flat monitor screen, and we wait not for a glimpse of sunlight flashing off a flapping sail but for a line of blue text to appear on a Gallery web-page, telling us a new jpeg image has been uploaded there. Today, instead of standing on a chilly quayside, wrapped up inside our cloaks and shivering in the cold sea air, we space-flight enthusiasts, eager for news from “out there”, will sit in front of computers, either in our warm and cosy bedrooms and studies or sneakily, in our bustling offices, then log onto the Messenger website and check, again and again and again, for new pictures, new information and new insights into what’s happening to a small unmanned spacecraft, racing towards a tiny world that spins deep in the fierce glare of Sol.

Space exploration lends itself to exaggeration and hyperbole perhaps more than any other science or interest. Planets’ and moons’ craters are described as “yawning”, their valleys as “sprawling”, their mountains “towering”, and every mission is described as being “historic” in one way or another. But today is a genuinely historic day, because until today Mercury has been an enigmatic, incomplete world. The “Mercury” spread in every astronomy book on every shelf in every bookshop, school or space geek’s bedroom has been illustrated with pictures showing the planet as a grey or muddy brown cratered globe with large blank areas on it. Today all those books will be rendered out of date, all those illustrations obsolete, because the blanks will be filled in, and within a few days’ time we’ll truly Know Mercury.

I’m nervous, and I’m just watching from afar, so what on Earth must the people behind the mission be feeling? It’s easy to imagine the scene in the Messenger control room as the aforementioned clock ticks down towards zero - engineers and technicians and scientists seated at their own computers, cups of coffee and snack wrappers everywhere, nervous smiles on their faces as they wait, and wait, and wait, knowing that soon Messenger’s cameras will begin clicking, its instruments will start humming and scanning and measuring, and Mercury will begin to give up its secrets to them – but on a purely human level what must those men and women be feeling as these final hours and minutes crawl by, knowing that, as zero hour approaches, although the odds are against it, Something Really Bad Could Happen and their space-probe could fall silent at any moment and there’d be nothing they could do about it, nothing at all…?

And so we wait, all of us, Messenger team and armchair explorers alike. It’s torture, it really is.

But it will be worth the wait.

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