Martian Flyby
201, 300, 000 kilometres from Earth
Dear Susannah
The House of Ares. The most legendary planet in the solar system. Home to H.G.’s intellects cool, vast and unsympathetic, and to E.R.B.’s Martian Princess, the perfectly named Dejah Thoris, subject of many an adolescent dream. And now briefly a dusky beacon denoting our passage from the inner to the outer solar system, a way station that tells us we are about to enter a billion kilometre wide No Man’s Land, the zone between the inner terrestrial planets (so favoured by the Sun) and the outer gas giants (Saturn, Jupiter and Neptune). I refuse to consider the preposterously named Pluto as a genuine planet. It is nothing more than a giant moon tracing a lonely ellipse at the very edge of the Suns’ reach.
This really is the beginning of the abyss, the borders of our Empty Quarter, our Rub-al-Kali, an airless, pressureless desert where no life can possibly exist without the protection of an artificial environment.
I am reminded of Gandalf’s words at Minas Tirith as he contemplates the battle ahead, the war that will make the streets of Gondor run with the blood of men and Orks alike. The deep breath before the plunge. Gandalf was the greatest of Tolkien’s wizards, dwarfing the juvenile wand-wavers that came later. This is our deep breath. Our still moment poised like a dew drop about to fall. The ship is strangely quiet as we contemplate the plunge we are about to make through this most desolate region, one that makes any terrestrial desert seem like a fair and pleasant land by comparison. I can only pray that our fragile home will not be where the hammer blow of this particular battle – the one between Galileo and the void through which she travels – will fall the hardest.
The hammer blow of an asteroid strike is what we all fear the most. In truth there is little we can do to avoid such an impact. We can hardly take evasive action, even if we see the assassin before it strikes. Like that other Iron Lady, Galileo is not for turning. She has a manoeuvring circle wider than most planetary orbits. I know that’s an exaggeration but we can no more change trajectory than an arrow can change course mid-flight. Galileo has been loosed from its bow. All we can do now is wait for this cosmic arrow to hit its target. A still very distant goal.
Mars is the most glamorous planet in the solar system, far from barren. Its oversized continents, which seem to have grown massive in the low gravity like salt crystals expanding in water, are teeming with the life which has been bestowed upon it by some of the most fertile imaginations in history. It’s easy to see how Percival Lowell was deceived by this most beguiling of worlds, conjuring canal-building civilizations from the polar mists.
Sometimes I think I can see them too.