We
follow. #AreWeThereYet?
What's
not to love about a
space mission that delivers more drama, danger and comebacks
than a sci-fi franchise? Only last week, we got another
cliff-hanger as space-craft Rosetta tracked down its long-lost lander Philae. Marvellous
as the engineering has been, it's the imagination that's kept me
riveted to my desktop porthole. ESA transported us across the
solar system via our Twitter-feeds. Beam
me down, Scottie.
Those
razor-sharp
OSIRIS photos of comet 67P put me right there, kicking up carbon-dust.
Where
early Egyptians drew constellations on coffin-lids to guide departing
souls, ESA let us ride the stars. This virtual adventure inspired me
to
create
a
poet's saga for the digital age:
Philae's
Book of Hours. So Philae
is a chattering soul-bird.
And though its song has since fallen silent, it had us spellbound in
its season. Its cometary resting-place Abydos
was named for an ancient cemetery. In Egyptian mythology, after death
a human-headed soul-bird flits between the lands of living and dead.
I thought of ESA scientists at computers communing across vast
distances to their metal avatar in this underworld. But Philae
ventured into the dark on our behalf too, an android explorer probing
an icy wilderness, an ingenious box of tricks sifting air and dirt
for the secrets of creation. And most extraordinary of all, it
talked to
us. Well-named for an obelisk that unlocked an ancient language, it
kept up a stuttering dialogue for days. #LifeOnAComet
Its subsequent silence always hummed with the promise of more.
'You
bide your time,
faithful
as
a mummified dog... When
you
wake at last, Philae
you
are babbling
to yourself
a
snakeskin song of telemetry
a
cometary Book of Hours ...'
Rosetta
is the mother-ship goddess,
blue-winged like the protective figure of Isis, who knew a thing or
two about resurrections. So whip-smart, quick on its feet,
engineering with attitude. Think Princess Leia before the bikini. But
this solar-panelled spacecraft could also be sun-god Ra's midnight
barge crossing the dangerous realms of the afterlife.
When ESA's scientists described the comet's icy jets as
a 'living
thing, a dragon
waking up,'
the storyteller in me was hooked. Rosetta's
zig-zagging course was a pyramid
trajectory.
It had to dodge comet 67P's fierce outpourings, just as Ra and his
'crew of gods' had to steer past Apophis, the fire-spitting snake.
Surely
this is a classic Hero-Quest, a space-voyage in an aluminium boat on
a wing and a prayer. Han Solo minus the laser-gun.
And
then there is the comet, captured in mesmerising black-and-white
shots in all its rugged variety. I am addicted to those OSIRIS
close-ups. Tracts of wildernesses marked not by space-boot but by
Philae's human-made SESAME feet.
I see
comet
67P as a book.
Let's call it a book of maps, a cartography of 26 alien regions
'named
for Gods of the Old Kingdom'.
All very Star-Gate.
ESA's Egyptian analogy for the space mission finds its fullest
expression in their colour-coded maps of 67P's rocky terrains.
Rosetta's own burial chamber will be a cometary pit of hell. I love
that it's named for Deir-El-Medina,
an Egyptian archaeological site filled with tomb-workers' rubble. But
the comet is a book of spells too, a book that spits and fires and
sings. A book that hides its secrets deep in pages of ice-dirt, in a
crease of rock or sudden abyss:
'…
The
comet is spitting
creatively
uncharted
twinklings, carbon-glints,
constellations
of grit, a cosmic
sneeze
of light.'
Some
Earthlings are sad
that the mission is drawing to a close.* That we will cease our
conversation across space with Rosetta's satellite. No more fly-by
postcards from the underworld. No time-delayed messages from the
box-robot forever hanging on its cliff. Yes, I'll miss all that. But
the scientific stories that Rosetta-Philae gifted us are still being
decoded. We will be thumbing the pages of 67P for decades to come.
And this space-epic has already become a tale of us
at our best, coming together in many languages, to achieve an extraordinary feat. No wonder we painted
a face on Philae and begged it to call home. Like the Egyptians,
we've daubed this fable on our walls. Rosetta and Philae are celebrated in our poems, rock albums, t-shirts, e-wallpapers,
sculptures, cartoons, comet-shoes, installations and origami. They
are already legends. As the Pyramid texts promise, 'you
have died but you will live.'
* ESA has invited followers of Rosettta & Philae to 'Share your personal experiences and feelings about the mission' on a Rosetta Legacy Page. See: http://rosetta-legacy.tumblr.com/ This blog-post appeared there in September 2016.
