61 of 100: Nasa's Europa Clipper mission (and a poem by Ada Limón)

I am stealing wholesale an email I received today, about a project that is fascinating, and that incorporates a beautiful poem. Here's the intro (modestly adjusted by me):

As part of her stint as US poet laureate, Ada Limón wrote “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” dedicated to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. She debuted the poem on June 1, 2023, to kick off the NASA “Message in a Bottle” campaign, which invited people around the world to sign their names to the poem. The poem has been engraved on the Clipper, along with participants' names that were etched onto microchips mounted on the spacecraft. Together, the poem and names will travel 1.8 billion miles on Europa Clipper’s voyage to the Jupiter system.   

One point eight billion miles, people!

The Clipper is scheduled to launch tomorrow, October 10, at 12:31 p.m., on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida (assuming Hurricane Milton doesn't interfere). Beyond Earth, Jupiter's moon Europa is considered one of the solar system's most promising potentially habitable environments.

Here is the poem. It moves me to tears, truly. I've included a bit more on the science of the mission at the end of this post.

In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa

by Ada Limón

Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we

pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book
of the universe, expert and evident.

Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.

And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,

each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark. 

 

What will Europa Clipper do?

Europa Clipper’s main science goal is to determine whether there are places below the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa that could support life. [Ed.: Jupiter has 95 or more moons, by the way, three of which—Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto—are icy. In April 2023 the European Space Agency launched its own spacecraft, the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or Juice, to study these three, especially the latter two.]

The mission’s three main science objectives are to understand the nature of the ice shell and the ocean beneath it, along with the moon’s composition and geology. The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet.

NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft will perform dozens of close flybys of Jupiter’s moon Europa, gathering detailed measurements to investigate the moon. The spacecraft, in orbit around Jupiter, will make nearly 50 flybys of Europa at closest-approach altitudes as low as 16 miles (25 km) above the surface, soaring over a different location during each flyby to scan nearly the entire moon.

Designed for Jupiter’s tough radiation environment

Because Europa is bathed in radiation trapped in Jupiter's magnetic field, Europa Clipper's payload and other electronics will be enclosed in a thick-walled vault. This strategy of armoring up to go to Jupiter with a radiation vault was developed and successfully used for the first time by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. The vault walls—made of titanium and aluminum—will act as a radiation shield against most of the high-energy atomic particles, dramatically slowing down degradation of the spacecraft's electronics.

Life beyond Earth

Europa shows strong evidence for an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust. Beyond Earth, Europa is considered one of the most promising places where we might find currently habitable environments in our solar system. Europa Clipper will determine whether there are places below Europa’s surface that could support life.

The spacecraft's payload will include cameras and spectrometers to produce high-resolution images and composition maps of Europa's surface and thin atmosphere, an ice-penetrating radar to search for subsurface water, and a magnetometer and gravity measurements to unlock clues about its ocean and deep interior. The spacecraft will also carry a thermal instrument to pinpoint locations of warmer ice and perhaps recent eruptions of water, and instruments to measure the composition of tiny particles in the moon's thin atmosphere and surrounding space environment. 

Book Report: Lonesome Dove

16. Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (1985) (10/5/24)

One day on the way home from doing trail work in the Ventana Wilderness, my companions and I got to talking about books. I'm not sure how Lonesome Dove came up, but the other two had read it and said it was great—maybe even one of the best books they'd ever read. Now, that's a mighty good recommendation. So I ordered it. And then, unusually for me, I picked it up and started to read, almost immediately. (Usually, the 857-page books get shelved and glare at me, making me feel guilty, for years on end.) I did have to put it down briefly for the last book I read, but for the last couple of months I've been immersed in Lonesome Dove. 

And man oh man, what a book—what a story—what a cast of characters. It definitely deserved its Pulitzer Prize.

What to say about it, really? The book is basically a road trip on horseback, surrounded by cows. It's a restlessness on the American frontier, a quest to satisfy a dream. One of the two Hat Creek head honchos, Augustus McCrae, is bigger than life (though I cannot picture Robert Duvall playing him in the TV series—for me, he was Sam Elliott all the way; though Duvall could easily be the other head honcho, Call... maybe I will adjust my take once I've seen the series, which I definitely intend to do... as for Tommy Lee Jones as Call, ditto, but again: I'll check it out, maybe it works). Though it does have the grace of a few women's stories as well. And Sheriff July Johnson's story. And the brief appearances of random other characters. So much life!

But it's a sad story. Although it begins in optimism and high spirits, it ends up, well, yes, sad. Sad in the way life can be sad, with its losses and missed opportunities and wrong turns and hardness. There is the satisfaction of actually finishing the drive of the cattle from Texas to Montana near the Canadian border and the establishment of a ranch. And some of the characters find their way to a place of stability and safety, at least, if not necessarily happiness. But there are so many lost opportunities, missed connections. So much loneliness.

I flagged the book like crazy. Here's a passage from chapter 2 (of 102), when the mood was playful and optimistic. The chapter begins by describing Woodrow Call's habit of seeking alone time:

Of course, real scouting skills were superfluous in a place as tame as Lonesome Dove, but Call still liked to get out at night, sniff the breeze and let the country talk. The country talked quiet; one human voice could drown it out, particularly if it was a voice as loud as Augustus McCrae's. Augustus was notorious all over Texas for the strength of his voice. On a still night he could be heard at least a mile, even if he was more or less whispering. Call did his best to get out of range of Augustus's voice so that he could relax and pay attention to other sounds. If nothing else, he might get a clue as to what weather was coming—not that there was much mystery about the weather around Lonesome Dove. If a man looked straight up at the stars he was apt to get dizzy, the night was so clear. Clouds were scarcer than cash money, and cash money was scarce enough. 

And here's a passage from chapter 92, a hundred pages from the end, featuring Gus's true love, Clara—though they were both too independent to be able to come together—and her helping hand, Cholo. Clara's husband has just died, after lying in a sort of coma for three months having been kicked in the head by a horse. And years earlier, she lost three sons to sickness, who continue to haunt her thoughts.

They sat quietly for a while, drinking coffee. Watching Clara, Cholo felt sad. He did not believe she had ever been happy. Always her eyes seemed to be looking for something that wasn't there. She might look pleased for a time, watching her daughters or watching some young horse, but then the rolling would start inside her again and the pleased look would give way to one that was sad.
     "What do you think happens when you die?" she asked, surprising him. Cholo shrugged. He had seen much death, but had not thought much about it. Time enough to think about it when it happened.
     "Not too much," he said. "You're just dead."
     "Maybe it ain't as big a change as we think," Clara said. "Maybe you just stay around near where you lived. Near your family or wherever you was happiest. Only you're just a spirit, and you don't have the troubles the living have."
     A minute later she shook her head, and stood up. "I guess that's silly," she said, and started back to the house.

I've got death on my mind lately anyway, and most of the deaths that happen in this book were, yes, sad—unnecessary, in a way, though of course the only "necessity" about death is that it happen, at some point. Many, or maybe all, of these deaths come from violence, whether natural—a swarming mass of cottonmouth snakes—or human-caused—being gunshot or lanced or arrowshot or hanged. You want to see the bad guys get their dues, but not the good, innocent ones. The ones still trying to figure out, understand, just what they really want from life.

This is apparently the third book in a tetralogy. I'm content to inhabit only this slice of that reality. I don't want to see any more death (McMurtry, in a 2010 preface to LD, indicates that a main character who ends up alive in this book does eventually meet his end, and honestly, I'd rather just remember him alive), and I don't need to experience the Texas Rangering past of Gus and Woodrow. This book gave me an entire world, and I am grateful, if sadly so, for that.

60 of 100: Perfect Japanese expressions

I have a vivid memory of watching Singing in the Rain in my apartment in Madison, Wisconsin, in the middle of the afternoon during a great thumping thunderstorm, when all of a sudden—just as Gene Kelly started swinging around that lamppost—the sun came out, so bright. And I've always also had a memory of a certain word, in Japanese, that describes just that: bright sunshine during a rainstorm, a portmanteau word that I've not been able to find again, though I did find the expression kitsune no yomeiri, or fox's wedding, to express what in English we call a sunshower.

Many other such perfect words do exist in Japanese, though. Starting with the one that inspired this post: 

木漏れ日 komorebi, meaning dappled sunlight filtered through tree leaves. It was the original working title of Wim Wenders's Perfect Days, which we watched tonight—and yes, there are plenty of shots straight up, into tree canopies, with light filtering down. It's a sweet feeling, to be in that light, and how lovely that Japanese has a single word for it.

That word got me googling, of course, and I found some lists with other excellent words. Here are a few of them.

懐かしい natsukashii, meaning bringing forth grateful memories of the past. It's not nostalgia, tinged with sadness or longing, but rather a contented feeling of gratitude: that the memory happened at all, even if one has moved on in life.

生きがい ikigai: a reason for being—or simply for getting up in the morning. I wrote about ikigai here.

守りたい mamori tai, meaning literally I will always protect you: something whispered to a loved one

森林浴 shinrin-yoku: forest bathing—expressing the calm we experience when walking in a forest, or in nature; an inner sense of balance; a return to our natural essence

浮世 ukiyo: floating world—a state of mind, being in the present moment, detached from the stress of daily living

甘美な kanbina: a word that sounds sweet and pleasant to the ear. When people ask me what my favorite word is, I always say "petrichor," though it may not be for the sound of the word so much as what it denotes... but it's still my favorite word.

木枯らし kogarashi, meaning wintry wind: perhaps that moment when you realize, yes, the seasons are changing—in this case, from summer to fall and then winter. I wonder if there's a word for that counterpart sweet moment when you realize that the days are getting longer, and yes, spring is on its way. But definitely, every year, twice, I do stop and notice the transition. It's a marker of time, and of life.

And related to that, 風物詩 fuubutsushi, things that remind of a season, like pumpkins for fall or daffodils for spring

一期一会 ichi-go ichi-e, or treasuring an unrepeatable moment—not too different from natsukashii, above: the Japanese seem to be good at acknowledging profound experience (though I am questioning the translation of the Japanese phrase: one-something, one-something ≠ treasuring an unrepeatable moment...); in any case, this expression is apparently used especially in the context of the Japanese tea ceremony

Other terms I've included elsewhere in this blog (I seem to have a fascination for perfect Japanese expressions): 侘寂 wabi-sabi, imperfect beauty; 物の哀れ mono-no-aware, the poignant sadness of impermanent things.

But I will end with 積ん読 tsundoku: acquiring books and letting them pile up without reading them. Because yes. For sure. I should put that word—the Japanese one—on my gravestone, and let passersby just wonder. If they're even that curious. I'm afraid I despair that curiosity even exists in most of my neighbors anymore...

Wait, no: I'll end with a word I encountered in a friend's blog post about going to a train museum, where he mentioned "retirement-age train otaku," a term I'd never encountered—so of course I had to look it up. It's slang for "anyone with an obsessive interest in something," often to the detriment of their social skills: a nerd, a geek, fanboy or -girl. Originally used in response to the 1982 Macross fandom (when the term referred to anime and manga specifically), it is usually rendered in katakana, オタク, and comes from the honorific form for "you," お宅, where taku means "home."

59 of 100: Two poems

I posted the first poem on FB today, and in response my nephew's partner, Nicole, posted the second one. They both beautifully express how I'm approaching time at the moment. Gingerly, respectfully.

Days

by Billy Collins

Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.

Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.

Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow

on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.

No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday,

you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday's saucer
without the slightest clink.

Awareness

by William Stafford

Of a summer day, of what moves in the trees.
Of your own departing. Of that branch no one else notices.
Of time, what it carries, the sideways drift of it.
Of hiding important things because they don't belong in the world.
Of now. Of maybe. Of something different being true.

58 of 100: Focus

Stuff is happening in my life that is distracting me from this blog. But today I would just like to post a few links to an interesting feature in the New York Times, "10 Minutes." As they put it, "Focus is a skill. We'll help you practice." And further (from the initial posting, on July 20):

Our attention spans may be fried, but they don’t have to stay that way.

In a modest attempt to sharpen your focus, we’d like you to consider looking at a single painting for 10 minutes, uninterrupted.

Our exercise is based on an assignment that Jennifer Roberts, an art history professor at Harvard, gives to her students. She asks them to go to a museum, pick one work of art, and look at only that for three full hours.

We are not asking for hours. But will you try 10 minutes?

The practice is called "slow looking"; you can read more about it here. And Roberts's actual assignment is available here; it's useful for giving a whole set of 16 aspects of a painting/work of art to think about.

The first work of art in the NYT series is Nocturne in Blue and Silver by James McNeill Whistler. And the next week, they published a follow-up article with readers' reactions.

The second is the ca. 1500 tapestry The Unicorn Rests in the Garden. 

Yesterday they posted the third in this experimental offering, Canopy by Catherine Murphy (2020).

And they are promising two more, which I will include here when they appear.

Ezra Klein featured a professor and author of the book Attention Span, Gloria Marks, on his podcast back in January. It's one I've given a repeat listen to: I can use all the help I can get staying focused.

I'm going to give these "10 Minutes" exercises a try as well. I think it will be good for me. 

Update: the work of art posted for 9/26 was Hiroshige's Great Bridge: Sudden Rain at Otake.

And on 10/3, an "unfinished, finished" portrait by Alice Neel from 1965—the last in the series. I've enjoyed these little exercises. I hope the instigators bring the feature back.

57 of 100: Grains of paradise

David recently bought a big bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin. On its sides are listed the ten ingredients that go into its special flavoring. I recognized half of them: almond, lemon peels, liquorice, coriander, and of course juniper berries. The other half, not so much: orris root, angelica, cassia, cubeb, and the mysterious grains of paradise.

When I read out these ingredients to David, who was busy cooking dinner (I like to keep him informative company while he slaves away), he asked me to look up grains of paradise, find out if it was real.

And yes indeed! Grains of paradise, aka melegueta pepper, Guinea grains, osame, or fome wisa—or, most reliably, Aframomum melegueta—is in the ginger family and closely related to cardamom. Its seeds impart a pungent, black pepper–like flavor with hints of citrus. It is native to West Africa (as the blue Bombay bottle also indicates), which is sometimes known as the Pepper Coast because of this commodity. Native to swampy habitats along the West African coast, the plant has trumpet-shaped purple flowers that develop into two-to-three-inch-long pods, whence the grains of paradise: small reddish-brown seeds. 

Melegueta—the pods and leaves—makes up 80–90 percent of the diet of the Western Lowland gorilla! Wow! They also use it make nests and beds. Full use of the resource. (The lack of grains of paradise in their zoo diet may contribute to poor cardio-vascular health.)

The spice was traditionally carried by camel caravan through the Sahara up to Sicily, then to the rest of Italy. In the 14th and 15th centuries it served as a popular substitute for black pepper (Piper nigrum). Today, it gives flavor to craft beers (for instance, Silverback Pale Ale out of Austin, Texas), Norwegian akvavit, and, yes, gin.

Wikipedia says, "In West African folk medicine, grains of paradise are valued for their warming and digestive properties, and among the Efik people in Nigeria have been used for divination and ordeals determining guilt. A. melegueta has been introduced to the Caribbean and Latin America, where it is used in Voodoo religious rites. It is also found widely among Protestant Christian practitioners of African-American hoodoo and rootwork, where the seeds are employed in luck-bringing and may be held in the mouth or chewed to prove sincerity."

Book Report: Death Benefit

15. David Heilbroner, Death Benefit: A Lawyer Uncovers a Twenty-Year Pattern of Seduction, Arson, and Murder (1993) (8/7/24)

I was happily engrossed in Lonesome Dove—a quarter of the way in—when a FB friend, John, asked whether, if I wasn't going to read a book he had lent me, I could send it back to him. So, feeling a tad guilty for having hung on to it so long, I took a break from the dusty mesquite plains of Texas (the boys—and Lorena—were just about to leave on their cattle drive north to Montana... which happens to be where John lives, but that's just happy coincidence) and immersed myself in murder and mayhem in Kentucky and California.

I know John from Monterey County Search & Rescue, where I volunteered for a good dozen years, and he worked as a deputy sheriff a few decades ago. That is, we didn't meet on the team, but SAR folks are a family, no matter when our tenure. 

And it turns out, he was lead in the body recovery that kicks off this book. As such he was gifted with an "uncorrected proof" about the five-year story, which is what I read (resisting every impulse to pull out my pen and correct the darn thing: it's riddled with errors).

The story is mostly a legal procedural. It begins in 1987 when a corporate lawyer in Louisville, Steven Keeney, is approached by a woman at church with a question about life insurance: her daughter, Deana, had recently died in a fall from a cliff in Big Sur, California, and she was having trouble getting the proper paperwork from Monterey County to settle. He figured the issue was straightforward enough that he could help her with a little pro bono legal advice.

But as he looked into the matter, he began finding inconsistencies and weird coincidences. Starting with the fact that the couple Deana had been staying with in San Diego, and whom she accompanied on the drive up the central California coast, had helped her take out another insurance policy, with their son—and her supposed fiancé (even though she was married)—as the beneficiary. Not only that, but the policy was issued the day before they started their trip up Highway 1.

As Keeney investigates, he learns of mysterious fires (over the course of twenty years, six of the houses that Virginia McGinnis, Deana's host, had lived in had burned to the ground) and unexplained deaths (Virginia's three-year-old daughter, her second husband, her mother). In each case, insurance policies benefited Virginia. 

Did they push Deana off that cliff?

Keeney starts to build a case, and enlists the help of various investigators and lawyers both in Kentucky and in California. Finally, the case—of murder—is tried in San Diego, and the story becomes a courtroom drama. We remain in the heads of the prosecutors, the ones who are convinced of Virginia's guilt and hope to prove it, despite evidence that the defense, of course, paints as purely circumstantial. 

It's a pretty good book, though not the sort I generally read. But it had the allure of people I know in it, and local geography as well. In the end—I'll just spill the beans: you weren't planning on reading it, were you?—Virginia McGinnis was found guilty on all counts: murder in the first degree, conspiracy, insurance fraud, and forgery, as well as "special circumstances," murder for financial gain. Way to go, jurors! She was sentenced in 1992 to life without parole and spent almost 20 years in prison before her death at age 74. 

And yes, it was made into a TV movie in 1994, starting Peter Horton as Keeney and Carrie Snodgress as Virginia. 5.9/10 on IMDb. I will not be watching it. I know what happened.

And now I can pack the book up to send back to John, and return to the dusty plains.