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New Planets, New Inspiration

by Tom Jones 
“Thunderstorms over southeast Asia, the spangled cloth of the Milky Way stretching … toward the Magellanic Clouds. An occasional meteor below … Just a marvelous sky.”

Reading over my diary entry about a scene viewed from the darkened flight deck of the space shuttle Columbia, I can almost recreate the feeling I was floating out into that star field. My crewmates and I would wonder at the clouds of distant suns filling the sky above our shadowy Earth, its cloud tops faintly lit by star or moonlight. We were 220 miles up, but we wanted to go beyond: to know what was out there among the thousands of glowing stars filling the black velvet of the heavens. Our weightless bodies were bound in orbit by gravity, but our imaginations were free to race into that fantastic universe.

A vast gulf, of course, still separates today’s space travelers from the neighboring planets and alien suns glinting in the void. The moon is 240,000 miles distant, three days away using our best chemical rockets. Astronauts could reach nearby asteroids on round-trip voyages lasting three to six months. Mars, at closest approach, is about 35 million miles away, nearly 150 times farther than the moon. Following a fuel-efficient trajectory to the Red Planet would take anywhere from six to nine months. Reaching Pluto, 3.7 billion miles from the Sun, takes at least a ten-year cruise through deep space – one way. Proxima Centauri, 4.22 light years away, is in another league altogether. A conventional spacecraft would take more than 73,000 years to reach this nearest star.

The cosmos we inhabit is immense beyond our ability to comprehend. Our sun, for example, is 26,000 light years from the center of our Milky Way galaxy. We can’t physically cross that distance, but human curiosity is undaunted. In mid-October, astronomers from the European Southern Observatory announced that, using a 3.6-meter telescope in La Silla, Chile, they had detected 32 new worlds orbiting other suns. Their discoveries bring the number of known extra-solar planets, or “exoplanets,” to 403, circling 340 other stars. (Check the latest tally at http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/). 

Since finding the first exoplanet in 1995, the planet hunters’ goal has been the discovery of an Earth-like world, circling its sun in the “sweet zone” of distance and temperature that might support life. Such detections are tantalizingly close: the latest discoveries include a handful of worlds that are just a few times larger than our own. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is currently scanning 100,000 nearby stars for tell-tale signs of a planet similar in size and composition to our own.

In space, I felt at once both humbled and privileged. It humbled me to realize how puny I was, orbiting an unremarkable star, one of a hundred billion comprising an ordinary galaxy, adrift among billions of other galaxies. Yet I was grateful to my God, the Creator of such a vast and complex cosmos, for granting me this glimpse of His work.

We humans seem to have a drive to explore, to look beyond the next horizon, to find knowledge and opportunity beyond our earthly frontiers. This curiosity is part of what makes us human. Given the staggering size of the universe, we would be justified in throwing up our hands in despair at ever plumbing its depths. Instead, we are all the more intrigued, more determined to find our place in it. The inspiring cosmos is an invitation, hand-delivered to us by its maker, and we cannot refuse it.

Tom Jones is a planetary scientist and four-time shuttle astronaut. His latest book is “Planetology: Unlocking the Secrets of the Solar System.” www.AstronautTomJones.com. 

 

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)