Posted Wednesday night, April 14, 2021.
Color photograph of Saturn taken from the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA and the European Space Agency, via the Hubble Newsletter.
This is how Carl Niebur, a program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., began his career as a space traveler:
Niebur knew long journeys, having taken one of his own to the nation’s capital from Breese, Illinois (Pop. 3,000), all cow pastures and corn fields. It was as idyllic a place as you might find on the Earth planet, and Breese was the big town in his part of the windy prairie state. On birthday as a boy, he received a little three-inch refracting telescope. To the extent that it had a brand, it was “the white one,” and that very first night, he hauled it to the backyard and aimed it expectantly at a pristine pitch of rural American sky. Curt got his celestial bearings, pressed expectant eye to eyepiece, and suddenly those points of distant light inflated into worlds as real as Breese. And each was so different! Mars, the color of rust and capped with white. Jupiter and its watchful red eye and tan and brown bands of clouds---and moons! It had moons! Four of them! AND YOU COULD SEE THEM! There was Saturn, rings and all, just as the textbooks promised! You’re in sixth grade learning about all this stuff and it’s just a few photos in science class…, but then you strap on that telescope for the first time and all at once you’re not dealing in the theoretical. You’re a space traveler. Science suddenly isn’t a class you take in school, something that begins and ends with fill-in-the-blanks and multiple-choice questions---it is a thing that is absolutely, metaphysically happening and I have seen it and there’s no going back from that.
---from “The Mission: A True Story” by David W. Brown.
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