Thank you, Mr. Clarke, for flying by

Many love and horror stories have been inspired by full moon nights. The song Like a Lover goes “like a lover the velvet moon, shares a pillow and watches while you sleep… it gently arrives on tiptoe gently taking you in its embrace.” In the same embrace, you find awakened werewolves and vampires in horror stories. It is quite a versatile moon, shuttling between our romances and our nightmares. We treat our one singular satellite — our very own moon — as the repository of our dreams, as well as the spherical reflection of our secret fears. And that is only one moon. Imagine if you lived in a planet with at least 52 moons. That is how it is if you lived in Saturn.

It was a beautiful full moon last Friday evening and against the advice of the standby guide, I still looked at it through the telescope. It is always deeply reassuring and humbling to look into space so the glare was worth it. But the best part was not seeing the moon through the telescope but seeing Saturn and one of its moons. It was really an awesome sight — like a radiant earring flung into dark space that it could immediately charm a viewer from at least 1.3 billion kilometers away on a beautiful island in another planet. Perhaps that is what captured one man’s imagination — a man who gave us the idea of how we could launch satellites to orbit our planet and not have them careening into space to the horror of investors.  

I am talking about Sir Arthur Clarke’s imagination. He was a scientist and a science fiction writer. I have some of his novels. Someone I loved chose parts of those novels to inspire his own flights of imagination. Born in England and educated in King’s College in Physics and Mathematics, Clarke passed away last March 19 in his home in Sri Lanka. He was 90 years old. He wrote many science fiction novels but his most famous book was The Sentinel, which was the basis of the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: Space Odyssey. In The Sentinel, one of Saturn’s moons was the home of mysterious monolith, which served as a star gate. When you ask scientists, there are very few science fiction writers that they admire. This is because one has to know science to write good science fiction; otherwise, it will just be fiction. The scientists I know of have only cited Sir Arthur Clarke and Douglas Adams (died 2001) who wrote Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in the same distinguished league.

But his practical legacy in science was the idea that global communications could be carried out by satellites. The idea, published in 1945, is called “geostationary orbit” since it involves the satellite moving in synch with the Earth’s movement without falling toward the Earth or getting irretrievably lost in space. Satellites are launched with just the right force to send them 36,000 kilometers from the Earth’s surface — where they can be held by the Earth’s gravity but not too much that they will collapse on to the surface. The satellite orbit is in fact called the Clarke Orbit.

The last video I could get hold of Sir Arthur Clarke was the one he made for NASA to congratulate them as the space probe Cassini-Huygens flew by Iapetus — one of Saturn’s moons in September last year. The universe is so vast that we celebrate every episode in our quest — not just launches into space or landings on moons or planets but even fly-bys. The most defining look of Saturn is its rings and conspicuous as they are, they still a big mystery to science. We are not really definite on what they are made of and what caused them — whether by its satellite moons or by something else.

The space probe Cassini-Huygens is partly named after Giovanni Domenico Cassini (June 8, 1625–Sept. 14, 1712), an Italian who was a mathematician and astronomer, among many other things. Arthur Clarke mentioned Cassini in his video greeting, saying that Cassini first discovered Iapetus in 1671. In Clarke’s The Sentinel published in 1948, he described Iapetus long before radio telescopes could give us a glimpse of it. Three hundred thirty six years later (2007), a probe launched from the same planet as Cassini, was flying by Iapetus. Clarke pointed this out as he sat on his wheel chair, where he had been confined since 1995. He could no longer walk but without a doubt, he could then still journey through space with the range of his mind and with the starry-eyed wonderment of a child who could never take his eyes off of an enchanted ringed planet — Saturn.

On March 21, 2008, light arrived in my own eyes from Saturn as I directed the telescope to it. I felt like I had my own personal fly-by across Saturn and if I had listened to the firm voices of science constantly lurking in my head, I could have heard what Sir Arthur Clarke said to NASA in his video greeting last year: “This is Arthur Clarke, wishing you a successful flyby.”

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