The Pasadena Star News was up at "the Lab" (JPL) to report on the end of the Galileo mission, Sunday. (Other JPL employees who weren't a part of Galileo were told to stay away from the lab, according to my JPL-employed boyfriend who wasn't a part of Galileo. So it is with dog and pony shows.)
Last night at the Pasadena Playhouse, The celebrated the mission with a commemorative program: Galileo and his Daughter, by Sava Sobel. Before that, a commemorative award was presented to a trio of people representing the thousands who worked on Galileo: John Casani and Claudia Alexander, the first and last Galileo Project Managers, and Torrence Johnson, Galileo Project Scientist. The introductory comments included recollections of trying to take orbital mechanics and designing a mission around it using a 1972-era portable computer (no screen, paper printouts), with the daisy-shaped orbit to all the moons actually calculated by the person in the Galileo Galilee chair at Padua University. We saw a film highlight of the mission (you can see it here on the Galileo Mission page in Real or QuickTime format, see first list item).
And then a reading; or interspersed set of readings- from Galileo's published works, describing his distance-viewer and his observations of the stars, and then of the discovery of little stars with Jupiter ("I render infinite thanks to God for being so kind as to make me alone the fisrt observer of marvels kekpt hidden in obscurity for all previous centuries"), and reflections on how he wished Copernicus were around to see his theory borne out.
And from his daughter, letters written to her father from the convent where she was, both congratulating him on wonderful letters he'd received that he'd loaned her so she could read 'em too, discussions of concern about his health, little gifts back and forth and the details of the glorious mundane (please fix this clock; here are some candies I made for your from citron; please send back the basket and linen from before, etc.)
The culmination in the Galileo part was a discussion of the presumption of a stationary earth at the center of near bodies and far bodies, all of which are in motion. He compared it to what it would be like to stand high in a tower overlooking a vast area, and that countryside would revolve around the tower just to keep a person from having to turn his head.
How do I describe what it's like to be in the audience with a number of scientists, engineers and other supporters of planetary exploration, on this day after the Galileo mission came to a close? We re-experienced the initial discovery of the behavior of these three, no, there are four stars near Jupiter, with the hindsight of 4 centuries and subsequent discovery. Laughter at certain spots had that undercurrent of knowing of those for whom these just-revealed discoveries are at the base of a person's own life work. Marvelling at the personality of this man who's called "The Father of Modern Science," and a context in which the recent discoveries of this mission transpired. For Galileo, the lead tube with a convex lens at one end and a concave one at the other. And now, a group of scientists and engineers who designed, built, flew, and fixed (and fixed and fixed) a spacecraft that's been in the Jovian neighborhood for a while, observing and finding new things about those "Medici stars" (what Galileo decided to name the four smaller stars around Jupiter--see? crass commercialism and a bow to one's underwriting sponsors existed 400 years ago, too). We go on discovering. It's easier, I think, to focus on a single individual at the beginning, but the great discoveries continue.
Late afternoon yesterday, I left the office where I've been freelancing. I described my plans for the night. "Do you think space exploration is a good thing?" I was asked, in light of mention of the need to destroy the spacecraft so as not to contaminate the moons with earthly microbes. Absolutely, I replied. Especially when it's the kind of mission that's cost-effective, with lots of new discoveries, moreso than the cost of the manned space program for more PR than real scientific discovery.
. . .
Afterwards, I met Dava Sobel. My copy of Galileo's Daughter is now signed. Dated the day after the end of the Galileo mission. It was a book on my bookshelf yesterday morning, today it has a little more historial heft to it as part of the record of our understanding of Jupiter.
(oh, and of course John Rhys-Davies rocks!!!)
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