by Pauling Barmby
Astrophysicist Pauline Barmby discusses how the patience required in planetary research helped inspire her story “Galilean Crossing,” featured in our [November/December issue, on sale now!]
October 14, 2024 saw the launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper mission on a Space-X Falcon Heavy rocket. Although conveniently coincidental with “Galilean Crossing,” my Europa-set story in the current issue of Analog, the launch timing has much more to do with Florida weather and solar system geometry than with publishing timelines. If all goes well, in 2030 Europa Clipper will be inserted into Jupiter orbit. Over the next three years, it will make 49 brief close approaches to the smallest of Jupiter’s four large moons, named “Galilean” for their discoverer Galileo Galilei. Europa Clipper’s nine science instruments will analyze Europa’s icy surface, subsurface ocean, and overall geology, with the goal of determining whether subsurface conditions could support life. But, as with most planetary science missions, the scientific excitement will be preceded by a long wait.
Five to six years is a typical time for missions to Jupiter, Saturn, or the asteroid belt. On its path to Jupiter, the Europa Clipper spacecraft will do a Mars flyby in 2025 and an Earth flyby in 2026 for gravity assists. The European Space Agency’s JUICE mission to Jupiter, launched in 2023, will do three flybys of Earth and one of Venus on its way to arrival in 2031. Mercury is harder to get to: the European/Japanese BepiColombo will take eight years, passing by Earth once, Venus twice, and Mercury no less than six times before it settles into orbit in 2026. At the other end of the solar system, the New Horizons mission reached Pluto in 2015 after only nine years, traveling so fast that it couldn’t slow down upon arrival.
What are the people who work on the mission doing between flybys? The engineers who run the missions—most of whom work for space agencies or affiliated labs—may be doing tests on the spacecraft or the ground-side data processing software, running rehearsals of critical events, or even working on other missions. The scientists who plan the missions and analyze the data—who work for agencies, labs or universities—are making analysis plans, gathering and analyzing complementary data (such as from ground-based telescopes, or previous missions), and doing all the other things that university types do: teaching, supervising student research, and community engagement. Engineer or scientist, agency or university, everyone is thinking about arrival. At least a few are probably thinking about what happens if the cruise phase ends badly: what if the landing fails, or the orbital insertion doesn’t work? Space science has plenty of examples: the Peregrine lunar lander, Mars Climate Orbiter, more than a dozen Soviet missions to Venus in the 1960s. It’s unnerving to live with the knowledge that a project on which you may have spent a third to a half of your career, even one that survived the dangers of a rocket launch, could still be gone in an instant.
It’s unnerving to live with the knowledge that a project on which you may have spent a third to a half of your career, even one that survived the dangers of a rocket launch, could still be gone in an instant.
Astronomers who work on space missions don’t usually have the same kind of long waits as our planetary scientist colleagues. Two decades ago, I was part of the team that built one of the cameras for NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. We didn’t have a long cruise: Spitzer was in its final Earth-trailing orbit within a week. The few months it took for the telescope to cool down to the near absolute-zero needed for infrared observations were incredibly busy, filled with tests, verifications and frantic data analysis. Many of my Spitzer colleagues went on to work on the James Webb Space Telescope, which took about a month to get to its final orbit. Over that month the nail-biting unfolding of the telescope and sunshade occurred. My colleagues had little idle time to wait and worry.
But what if your telescope were going really far away, like to the solar gravitational lens (SGL) point where the Sun’s gravity can focus the light from distant stars? The SGL is at about 600 times the Earth-Sun distance, 20 times further than Pluto, or about 3.5 times further than Voyager 1 has traveled in the 47 years since its launch in 1977. Maintaining expertise (and funding!) for a mission that might last decades or even centuries would be no small task. My story “Solar Gravitational Lens” imagines that a dying astronomer’s consciousness is uploaded to a spacecraft carrying a space telescope to the SGL, so he can run the mission autonomously. The uploaded consciousness takes long naps during the multi-decade journey and spoiler: the mission doesn’t quite go as planned.
Astronomers and planetary scientists study phenomena that can take hundreds of millions of years to unfold. Compared to geological and astronomical timescales, a few years’ wait is infinitesimally short, even if it doesn’t seem that way when the ability to pay your mortgage depends on a successful end to the wait. As a scientist, I find it both an enduring mystery and a joy that we humans, who are so small and so ephemeral compared to the universe’s vast scales of distance and time, can nevertheless make some small progress towards understanding the past and future of the cosmos. A little patience seems entirely proper.
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