A Space in Time Click for the universe … Your home computer, thanks to the windows that NASA has poked in space, is the site of the greatest show on earth. A deskbound cosmic pilgrim beckons us to an available sublimity

By Michael Benson July/August 2002 Atlantic Magazine Also published in Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes (Abrams, 2003)

n the evenings, when my par- Morse code; but it reveals a landscape the a packed arena of Romans, teeming and ticular piece of Earth has turned likes of which Samuel Morse, let alone kaleidoscopic, at the height of the em- I away from the Sun, and is exposed the ranks of Earth-based astronomers pire. They're savoring the gods'-eye view, instead to the rest of the cosmos, I sit in who have surveyed the planets since well watching the Red Planet turn. Would they front of a keyboard, log on, and seek out before Babylonian times, could scarcely have seen it as territory to conquer? Would the windows that look down at the planets have envisioned. they have sent in the legions? Mars, after and out at the stars. It's a markedly dif- all, was named after the Roman god of ferent experience from looking at repro- In case there was any doubt, many of those war, the father of Romulus and Remus. ductions on paper. What I see is closer to good old science-fiction predictions from And what about our age—which way, in the source. In fact, it's indistinguishable the 1950s and the 1960s are coming true. the end, will we go? "Earth is the cradle from the source. These are images that "NEW SQUAD OF ROBOTS READY of the mind," said the pioneering Russian have never registered on a negative. Like TO ASSAULT MARS" read a 1998 head- space-flight theorist Konstantin Tsi- the Internet itself, they are products of a line in the online Houston Chronicle, stir- olkovsky. "But we cannot live in a cradle digitized era. Over the past couple of years ring submerged memories of my adoles- forever." I've been monitoring the long rectangular cent readings of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot strips of Martian surface being beamed stories. But Asimov's sentient robots were A low hum resounds from the tiny fan across the void, in a steady stream of frequently confused. Something always recessed in my computer—a propeller zeroes and ones, from the umbrella-shaped seemed to be going wrong with them, and venting warmth from the machinery of vir- high-gain antenna of the Mars Global the mayhem that followed could inevitably tual travel. With rusty Martian sand dunes Surveyor spacecraft. These pictures are be traced back to a programming error still undulating across the screen, I notice so fresh that their immediacy practically by their human handlers—a situation not that outside, the Moon is rising over sub- crackles. Call it "chrono-clarity." That unfamiliar to those running NASA's Mars zero Central Europe. The city below it is bluish wispy cloud, for example, hovering program, which was temporarily grounded quiet, subdued under snow. Beyond brick over the Hecates Tholus volcano, which after a catastrophic pair of failures in late smokestacks a familiar cool light defines rears above the pockmarked surface of the 1999. (The Mars Climate Orbiter was lost the icy sphere. A ghostly mass of battered Elysium Volcanic Region in the Martian owing to the stark failure by one group rock, Earth's satellite is an archetypal eastern hemisphere—it has barely had of engineers to translate another group's solar-system object, with surface features time to disperse before I, or anyone with figures into metric units of measurement, echoing those of many of the planets and Internet access, can see it in all its spooky and the Mars Polar Lander because for moons arrayed in far-flung archipelagos beauty. The volcano emerges from the some unfathomable reason its landing gear around the Sun. But it's much more than pink Martian desert, which looks organic hadn't been adequately tested.) that—at least in the human context. The and impressionable—like human skin, or longer one considers it, the more its tidal the surface of a clay pot before firing. The For all their formidable prescience, influence grows. Without that luminescent tenuous cloud floats near the volcano's Asimov and his contemporaries Arthur C. lure would there even have been a pull to mouth, as if in prelude to an eruption. It's Clarke and Robert Heinlein didn't quite leave this planet? a picture composed of millions of dots and conjure up that still-startling compound of dashes of data, produced by a transmission populist forum, deep archive, and global Deciding to take a closer look, I acceler- technique just a few steps removed from amphitheater called the Internet. I picture ate away from Mars and shoot thirty years 1 into the past—descending rapidly through murderous, humiliated gleam in its eye. It and scanners, and driven by solar-powered the strata of the Apollo archives. I quickly left behind an independent—and remark- cells and radio-isotope thermo-electric find an excellent picture of a three-quarters ably unscathed—new country. generators—are redefining the limits of moon, taken by a large-format mapping human knowledge. Deployed at the perim- camera during one of the later manned I moved to this fringe of the disastrous eter, they're casting wide-eyed glances and missions, in the early 1970s. Almost the Balkans to make a film. When I finally making sophisticated measurements, well entire ravaged face is visible, with tactile finished, four years later, I remained based past any terra incognita where sea mon- gradations of surface texture readily ap- in Hapsburg-perfect Ljubljana while I took sters once seethed through oceans pouring parent—craters edging gradually toward the resulting movie—called Predictions off the rim of a flat planet. the terminator, that endlessly migratory of Fire—to festivals all over the world. line between day and night, and into dark- Meanwhile, I got involved in various Pretty soon I was hooked. I began com- ness. There's a three-dimensional, convex projects and lives. Then I got married— pulsively monitoring the progress of our quality to the image. But it looks some- and eventually had a son. The time never space-faring machines. how odd. I realize that I'm looking down seemed right to move back to New York. at a lunar surface divided between the side Without quite realizing it, I had become an That moon, rising implacably over always oriented toward Earth—the face expatriate. Ljubljana, has long since ceded center with a face, so to speak—and the far side. stage. It defined the first act, but now it's Two of the familiar eastern mares, or seas, But it didn't take me long to discover that a cameo, backlit by the immense universe are situated here on the left side of the it was possible to go even further out. beyond. It played its role well, though, picture—in the hemisphere visible from In the spring of 1995, on the early color using its small gravitational field to full Earth. On the right, facing deep space, monitor of a used IBM clone, the World advantage, gradually reeling the species well east of the immense circular basin Wide Web blinked to life on my desktop off Earth to have a look around. At the be- of Mare Crisium, the battered back of the for the first time. I quickly proceeded ginning of the fifth decade of space travel Moon is submerged in elongated shadows. past the novelty of being able to read The the various tools for that investigation New York Times while most of Manhat- have increased their power in exponential Suddenly, with a kind of vertigo, I sense tan slept, and discovered a way of look- jumps. What they're looking at is astonish- the home planet, way off past the left ing through the "windows" of crewless ing in its depth and diversity. border of the picture—and even myself, spacecraft—vessels that have seen Earth somewhere down there, at the age of ten, dwindle to the size of a pearl, and then NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which maybe looking up at the exact moment a pixel, as they voyaged far beyond any is in charge of all American unmanned the shutter fell on Apollo 16. I'm frozen in place ever directly observed by human be- missions, is keeping tabs on a record that same clockwork flux generated by the ings. Very far beyond. number of space probes these days. They spheres as they move inexorably through include the joint NASA-European Space space. Looking out the window again It takes only the briefest of Net-mediated Agency solar observatory, which has been (here, now, a traveler on a winter's night), shunts, in other words, to vault from the producing amazing stop-motion films of I realize that the Moon is in exactly the slate-gray drainpipes and cracked flag- quakes and tornadoes on the Sun for more same phase. stones of Vrhovceva Street No. 4 and than six years now, and the giant two-story through the open window of escape veloc- spacecraft Cassini, which has been thread- Between self, screen, and window, a kind ity—25,000 miles per hour. The procedure ing a circuitous course toward Saturn ever of temporal triangulation. And what am I is silent, with none of the countdown, since its launch, in October of 1997. Cas- doing now, if not the same thing as then? dazzle, and roar we associate with rocket sini swung past Venus twice, picking up Looking up, "just" in time. propulsion. But it works flawlessly none- gravity-assisted momentum each time, and theless. And once one has escaped Earth's then boomeranged around Earth again on When I return to Earth, it's always to gravity, the universe unfolds, revealing its seven-year flight to the ringed planet. Ljubljana. As far as most of my New York vistas across space and time so multi- On January 1 of last year the probe sent friends are concerned, I already live in faceted, so replete with the unlikely, the home one of the most beautiful color pho- outer space. Slovenia has never exactly mysterious, and the awe-inspiring, that it's tographs ever taken of Jupiter and its com- been at the center of things. It's not even astonishing that the whole procedure can panion moon Io. A behemoth compared at the center of that nebulous interzone be channeled through the good offices of a with most of the other new probes, Cassini called Central Europe. I came to this tiny local phone call. was designed well before the advent of nation of two million alpine Slavs shortly the "faster, better, cheaper" doctrine that after its dangerous secession from Yugo- Suddenly, on the screen as in reality, I saw the former NASA administrator Daniel S. slavia, in the summer of 1991. Ten days of the whole story—the human and even the Goldin introduced, with some fanfare, in intermittent, partisan-style war against the post-human story—delineated against a the early 1990s. This low-budget manage- federal army had devolved into an uneasy vast, starry black backdrop. Forget the ment philosophy, seemingly not appli- cease-fire, periodically shattered by the astronauts, marooned in low Earth orbit cable to the half-billion-per-blastoff space rolling kettle-drum crash of MiGs break- for three decades. A continual remote-con- shuttle, let alone the financially troubled ing the sound barrier overhead. But the trolled extension of boundaries is under International Space Station, requires that army soon withdrew, rumbling southeast way. Intricate space probes—encased in spacecraft cost less than $150 million and toward Croatia and Bosnia, with a kind of scarabaeoid shells, festooned with scopes go from the drawing board to the launch 2 pad in thirty-six months or less. It has these robots with which we're populating A few years ago I happened to be scrolling been under heavy bureaucratic scrutiny the heavens. In late fall an e-mail came to along the bone-dry branchings of a newly recently, owing to the loss of those two me from the JPL—something again au- discovered Martian riverbed when a small Mars probes in 1999. tomatic, sent through that other universe, headline started winking on and off like the one made of innumerable routers and an insistent neon sign, advertising a live Still, NASA's Discovery-class missions chips. It announced the launch of the first feed of the Mars Polar Lander launch. I were run according to this doctrine, and unmanned spacecraft capable of making steered my arrow over to the Real Player the program has racked up some real many of its own decisions regarding its icon next to it and clicked. A simulated TV successes. They include Global Surveyor, orientation vis-à-vis Earth. The phrasing set unfolded itself, voilà, in the browser which recently completed a photographic itself was intriguing—even if we were not window. The thing was approximately the map of the Red Planet to rival the best we yet talking about political orientation. If I size of a matchbox. From the virtuality of have of Earth, and Pathfinder, which cre- didn't know better, I might have begun to television to the next stage: the TV itself ated something of a media sensation back suspect that a kind of baton-passing was becomes virtual. This miniature screen- in 1997. Pathfinder bounced down on the taking place, far beyond the atmosphere. within-a-screen filled with what appeared Martian surface using a set of inflated air From flesh-and-blood us to nuts-and-bolts to be a close-up of Earth's surface: not bags, the first time such a landing method them. Science fiction? grass and soil, or the heaving Pacific, but had been attempted. It then opened its staggered gray concrete and an elaborate multiple petals like a mechanized flower Sifting through a self-congratulatory final web of girders, ramps, and drifting smoke. and proceeded to roll out a telegenic, press release archived at the Mars Path- Evidently the camera was mounted on insectoid little rover named Sojourner— finder site, I was suddenly, unexpectedly, the lower stage of a rocket. I was looking without a doubt the most charismatic moved. Contact with the lander was lost, directly down at Cape Canaveral launch unmanned vehicle in NASA history. it said, in early October of 1997. That was pad 17B. after nearly three months of continuous In early 2000, in an event largely ignored operation—much longer than expected. A tinny countdown issued forth from by the mainstream media, the Jet Propul- The loss of communication was attributed my computer's speakers, and I watched sion Laboratory eased a Discovery probe to the failure of the lander's battery, which the grainy yet kinetic, comically Lillipu- called NEAR (for Near Earth Asteroid in turn cut power to the heater. "After tian live launch of that ill-fated robotic Rendezvous) into orbit around a twenty- that," the text read, "the lander would be- mission. Tongues of bright-orange flame one-mile-long peanut-shaped, methodi- gin getting colder at night and go through flared out, filling the bottom of my stamp- cally tumbling rock called Eros. NEAR much deeper day-night thermal cycles. flat TV. The ground rushed away, rapidly was the first spacecraft ever to orbit Eventually, the cold or the cycling would becoming coastline and then cloudscape. an asteroid—no inconsiderable feat of probably render the lander inoperable." I clicked on the magnifying-glass icon to celestial navigation, given that Eros has a enlarge the toy picture, which expanded to gravity field so weak that an astronaut on But little Sojourner is almost entirely fill half the screen. The image now verged its surface could reach escape velocity by solar-powered. It was just as animated on abstraction, a scramble of "compres- simply jumping off. A year later project as ever when all contact with Earth was sion protocols" trying frantically to keep scientists maneuvered the probe to within lost. I came across the following sentence: up with the fast-paced reality of a rocket a few hundred yards of its subject and then "The health and status of the rover is ... blasting through the sound barrier and out directed it to touch down gently. NEAR unknown, but ... it is probably circling the of the atmosphere just like that. The arc thus became the first spacecraft to land on vicinity of the lander, attempting to com- of Earth's limb appeared—immediately an asteroid. municate with it." recognizable, as if coded in ancestral memory. Sixty-six seconds after liftoff NEAR hasn't performed flawlessly. Not The poignancy of it! The pathos! Powered four pencil-shaped solid-fuel boosters unlike an adolescent confronting the ob- forever by the inexhaustible Sun, impervi- separated from the Delta II rocket and ject of his or her erotic fascination for the ous to the cold, Sojourner may to this day fell gracefully away, trailing streamers first time, the spacecraft suddenly flipped be wearing grooves in that ocherous desert of smoke as they spiraled back toward out during its initial approach to Eros, in floor. And we've forgotten our cybernetic Florida. The curved horizon was defined December of 1998. Cut off from com- creation, literally leaving it to its own de- by the inky blackness of space. munication with Earth, acting on its own, vices. Having chipped, hammered, glued, the probe's computer managed to re-orient and then welded and screwed together Ironically, this image of our home planet the spinning craft. But by the time the the matter we're surrounded with, we've had a far lower resolution than do the crisp JPL flight engineers had figured out what finally endowed it with eyes, ears, and a pictures Surveyor has been wiring back went wrong, they were forced to send their capacity for self-direction—something from Mars. That's because time had been charge all the way around the Sun again— like early life itself. We've propelled it at added to space; it was, at least nominally, a year-long trajectory—for another try. extreme velocities to distances that rede- a motion picture, and a live one at that. fine how far human artifacts can go. And Fascinated by this example of technique They wouldn't have been able to do so if we've left it to circle, or even to beeline chasing technology, of software trailing NEAR hadn't straightened up and flown out of the solar system—still seeking or- hardware, I watched our pixelated planet, right all by itself. There's something fas- ders, still trying to communicate with us. a spinning blue globe forced continually cinating about the increasing autonomy of to reassemble itself as blocks of Atlan- 3 tic cloud moved lumpily forward. Data scribbles furtively at the end of a para- eventually the sky becomes the sole com- coursed through the modem with a barely graph, hoping nobody will notice. After mon denominator. discernible thrumming sound, something hundreds of years of fruitless observation like the brrrrrr of a hummingbird's wings. from Earth, followed by three decades of A chain of cities unreels in my memory Four and a half minutes into the flight robot flybys, orbiters, and three successful like a roll of archival film. I rewind to the horizon suddenly rose again, now in remote landings on the surface, it took the Ankara, Turkey, in the mid-seventies: An a free-wheeling spin. The lower stage of eagle-eyed, low-budget Global Surveyor acrid pall shrouds the minarets. The city the rocket—the one with the camera—had to finally divine water on Mars. Eureka! has some of the worst air pollution on fallen away. Then there was nothing but Earth. Each room of our large house has micro-miniaturized TV static: "snow" Gazing down at the luminous buttes and an electrostatic air-cleaner; an army of twice removed. The probe would soon mesas of Valles Marineris, an almost plastic wood-grained boxes tries mightily reach escape velocity. The feed was over. familiar landscape creepy in its emptiness to zap particulates before they reach our We human beings had been left far behind. of even the faintest flicker of life, I re- soft American lungs. But this brown haze Not for the first time. membered driving in the summer of 1996 is winter coal smoke. In the spring the from Arizona's Meteor Crater—the best- stars blink and wheel high over the Balgat Stubbornly refusing re-entry to Earth, preserved impact crater on Earth—to the hills, pristine and clear in the thin, dry I raced ahead of the new probe to Mars edge of the Grand Canyon: a place where Anatolian air. For my twelfth birthday I orbit again, where I looked down at the the Europeans settling the New World am given a telescope. Out on the darkened grandest canyon in the solar system—a came face to face for the first time with a lawn I point this tube—a device practical- jagged 2,500-mile-long gash that could geological past so deep that it called bibli- ly indistinguishable from the one Galileo easily span most of the continental United cal chronology into question. One reason Galilei built in the winter of 1609—up at States. This is Valles Marineris, named the Grand Canyon became so symbolically the glinting night sky. Like that heretic after its discoverer, the 1971 Mariner 9 important to the United States was that it Pisan, I rapidly discover a number of probe. In the past five years Surveyor has served as a geologically eloquent stand-in important things: The Moon is a cratered, zoomed up close on the eroded rim of for the young country's missing cultural mountainous body. The Milky Way is this immense canyon, which at points is history. (Native Americans, of course, composed of innumerable individual stars. more than six miles deep. The resolution didn't figure.) I wonder if it's a coincidence Jupiter, faintly striped, is attended by four of these pictures is so good that scientists that this nation—now able to boast the stars—spread out in a thin line parallel to could easily spot, say, a small concession longest continuous form of government its bulging equator. stand set up at the rim of Noctis Laby- on Earth—is centuries later expending rinthus, the complex series of connected the effort and resources to explore new, Several nights later I observe Jupiter rift valleys defining the canyon's western even more spectacular places where nature again. Those "stars" have changed their periphery. Coke? Fries? Oxygen? Huge bears no trace of human history. positions, relative to the planet and to one ancient river channels begin from Valles another. They're the Galilean moons. Marineris and run north. Many of them Nature, they say, abhors a vacuum. But lead to the boulder-strewn floodplains of the reference is really to humanity, always Nothing, however, prepares me for the Chryse Basin—the landing site of both Vi- rushing in with its gizmos and interpreta- sheer aesthetic pleasure of Saturn. How, king 1, which set down in 1976, and Path- tions. Maybe the serrated walls of that in all creation, could such an object have finder, which bounced to a halt, beach-ball Martian canyon exist as an antipode to the come about? Clearly visible in their style, some twenty years later. ones in Arizona. Maybe that chasm at the weightless tilt, as symmetrical as some- center of American iconography is mir- thing made by the most precise of machine I scrutinized the image produced as Sur- rored from above by Valles Marineris—a tools from the cleanest of mathematical veyor moved across the canyon's northern place signifying not a country's past but models on the largest lathe in the galaxy, edge. A small impact crater was clearly its future. Not the last frontier but the next the multiple rings encircling this improb- visible near the rim, as perfect as a drop one. able object redefine what nature is capable of rainwater captured a split second after of. Saturn is more beautiful than anything hitting a lake. Although this area otherwise Probably the fact that I've moved around I have ever seen on Earth. It is a presenta- looks as dry as dust, in April and May of the globe for much of a lifetime has tion, live and uncut, of cosmic perfection. 2000 startling images of the Gorgonum encouraged my tendency to place things Chaos region in the Martian southern in a cosmic perspective. Reportedly, the I pull eye from eyepiece and look down at hemisphere revealed what appeared to be handful of astronauts who bounced across the telescope's white barrel in amazement. recently formed gullies snaking through the Moon thirty years ago could sense, Technology may produce a haze to choke twisted terrain. Indistinguishable from even at ground level, that they were on a cities. It may leak crude into the oceans. similar formations on Earth, of the kind sphere. The horizon looked too close. It But it has also unveiled a universe made that form always and only above ground- also sloped downward, subtly but vis- of glittering jewels. water, they seem to indicate an aquifer ibly, in a strange and airless clarity. Being only a few hundred yards beneath the raised in a Foreign Service family, as I Hurtling effortlessly along the cyberspace- surface. was, can produce a similar effect on this ways more than two decades later, I moni- planet. Give yourself a multiplicity of tor blinking readouts and order micro-cir- And this, of course, is not something one camera angles, in enough time zones, and cuitry and interlinked telecommunications 4 devices to navigate among the planets and distant robot explorers. The sheer num- on the freakish diversity of the solar the stars. Never before have such solitary, ber of these pictures, combined with the system. To take only one example: Europa self-directed voyages into deep space very high traveling speed of the cameras' floats directly outside the orbit of a sister been possible. Even the lunar explorers, platforms, creates a cinematic effect. This moon named Io, which is the most volca- those who actually broke free of Earth and isn't a cathedral mosaic, arranged across nic object in known space. This extraor- traveled to another world, were slaves to a vaulted ceiling to make a composite dinary fire-and-ice pair couldn't be more their schedules and their uncompromising narrative of heaven. It's a flipbook—film different. Io is orange, purple, greenish in hierarchies of command. Opportunities to stills strung out in sequence along intricate places, and irreducibly strange. Squeezed simply gaze out the window, to allow the trajectories, culled from some of the most by the huge hand of Jupiter's gravity, it experience to register in the soul, were hyperkinetic dolly shots ever devised. erupts with dozens of hyperactive volca- few and far between. Many, when they re- noes that continuously spew plumes hun- turned, retained only sketchy, disembodied In the past five years the almost frighten- dreds of miles into space. The volcanoes' memories of what they had experienced. ingly beautiful trove of Jupiter images sent magma, which at its source can be far My journeys may not be actual, but they to Earth by the hit-and-run Voyager probes hotter than any on Earth, rains back down do give me plenty of time to mull over of the late seventies has been dwarfed on a constantly changing outer crust. In an what I've seen through the portholes. by reams of downloads from Galileo—a ongoing inside-out heave, Io is continually cybernetic descendant of its namesake that replacing its exterior with its interior. In May of 2001, a year definitively marked is currently orbiting within the complex for space by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Jovian system. Europa, one of the four Drifting now past Saturn's shimmering C. Clarke in their film of the same name, I moons discovered by Galileo in 1610, is rings, I see that they're aswarm with dust discovered that my personal space-explo- particularly stunning. Reminiscent of the and large boulders, and that they abound ration method had been validated by none sentient ocean planet in the Russian direc- in spokelike features and strange kinks— other than the National Research Council, tor Andrei Tarkovsky's film Solaris (but the former perhaps caused by electrostatic which recommended that an initial $60 frozen into bizarre, intricate patterns of charges in the dusty, weightless debris, million be allocated to create a "national fault lines, and "chaos terrain"), this haunt- the latter by the gravitational pull of two virtual observatory." With the quantity of ing sphere of frosted off-white is surfaced small "shepherd" moons. Entire schools data that pours down from the sky grow- entirely by branching, splintering, glitter- of theory have arisen to try to explain ing ever more unmanageable, it seems that ing ice. Although cue-ball smooth when these complex, ever-shifting phenomena. the old-style method of observation (in viewed from afar, up close it presents a Following the image trail to the farthest which astronomers, or kids on the lawn, fascinating array of elliptical fissures and periphery of the solar system, to Uranus point telescopes where they want to look) ridges—an Abstract Expressionist surface and Neptune, the most-distant planets is gradually being replaced by something that practically demands decipherment. In ever visited by a space probe, I catalogue called data mining (in which research- 1999 Gregory V. Hoppa, the late Randy bizarre sights along the way. There's ers examine many layers of pre-recorded Tufts, and a team of planetary scientists Miranda, the smallest of Uranus's major observations, frequently for the first time). from the University of Arizona went a moons. This 290-miles-in-diameter object, With the Hubble Space Telescope alone long way toward cracking the code, posit- named after Prospero's daughter in The downlinking more than two billion bytes a ing that the most mysterious fault lines Tempest, has huge faults twelve miles day, and with a higher-capacity next-gen- identifiable on Europa—the wave-form- deep. In one provisional theory scientists eration space telescope being assembled like "arcuate" fractures spiraling eerily speculate that it may have been repeatedly in the wings, archives with the capacity to across the crystalline landscapes near its shattered by unknown forces, and then house hundreds of terabytes are necessary. poles—are almost certainly a result of just as inexplicably reassembled, through- When Cassini finally reaches Saturn, in Jupiter's shifting tidal pull on subsurface out its obscure history. Bleakly lit by the 2004, its big high-gain antenna will start water. distant sun, floating in the ether, it may as firehosing data down from the outer solar well be the place fervently requested by system at such a rate that the resulting Only comparatively recently, in fact, have tempest-tossed Gonzalo: "Would I give flood will keep planetary scientists busy Europa's ramifications begun to register a thousand furlongs of sea, for an acre of for generations. Despite unprecedented within the planetary-sciences community. barren ground." data-processing capabilities, they'll only The result is a cautious, gathering excite- be seining at the shores of the deep data ment: the moon has become one of the Arriving finally at deep-blue Neptune, the ocean. leading candidates as a host for extrater- end of the line, I look down at the sullen restrial life. Some estimates hold that black storm that was its largest defining This outside-in, archival universe may be Europa contains five, even ten times as feature when Voyager 2 whipped past demanding all-new methodologies from much water as Earth. Richard Terrile, of the planet in 1989. Called the Great Dark the scientific classes, but it is also provid- the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, put it this Spot, it's a whirling bruise the size of ing squinty-eyed tourists like me with way to the press: "How often is an ocean Earth, and it whistles with the strongest more and more space to surf. With the discovered? The last one was the Pacific, winds yet measured on any planet. South Moon outside my frosted Ljubljana win- by Balboa, and that was five hundred of it, out of sync, an irregularly shaped dow now sliding well past its apex and de- years ago." white cloud—endearingly named Scooter scending toward the jagged Alps, I retrace by Voyager scientists—scuds frenetically the comet's tail of images produced by our As I continue hoarding pictures, I reflect along the planet's equator at 1,200 miles 5 per hour. do we stand in relation to this stellar train worm photons but of a spectral woven wreck? It isn't some dream beyond death. carpet of galaxies seemingly reaching on As I pass through the chill vacuum beyond In fact, it pre-dates our birth as a species. and out forever, deep into space and time. the Earth-surveyed solar system, I cast a And yet we miraculously came along About 1,500 venerable pinwheels and glance back at crescent Neptune and see to produce this perfect simulacrum, this other galactic forms careen through the that it reminds me of a work of art—some- freeze-frame of smashing stars, and to Hubble's cosmic "core sample," so faint thing created by a master toward the end bind it in a computer hard drive. they're undetectable by even the largest of a long career. There's a wintry virtuosity ground-based telescopes. Some of them at play, combined with a palpable absence The stardust we're made of was produced at magnitude 30 are still four billion times of any need to show off. Gone are the by vast explosions not unlike these. It was fainter than that which can be seen by the flashy excesses of Jupiter and Saturn. Nep- only much later that the double helix— unaided human eye. Called the Hubble tune's rings are tenuous, almost invisible. that genetic concatenation of biochemical Deep Field, the image gives vertiginous Its haunting, cantaloupe-skinned moon triggers, derricks, and hoists—arrived to new meaning to the term "recorded his- Triton, one of the coldest places in known work the material. Sometimes I wonder tory." nature, is dark and inscrutable. Yet in spite what it says about our civilization that of its deep-frozen state, activity is notice- most people haven't noticed, or taken Selecting the highest-resolution file of able even here: plumes of carbon as black the trouble to really look at, the amazing this picture I can find, a sixty-seven- as squid ink emerge from cracks in its cornucopia our sensors have been sending megabyte giant archived somewhere in surface. Wafting upward, they're whipped down from the heavens. Could the same England, I hit "load" and walk away from suddenly into horizontal lines by some secular era that produced these visionary the apartment for four hours. Ljubljana on unseen hand. Below this startling scene, machines be responsible for muting some a winter's night: kamikaze drivers barrel floating just above a blue vastness more of the awe that should presumably greet through a dense, rolling fog. I look up at unfathomable than any sea, a veil of wispy what they reveal? In investing them with a the sky; there's nothing there. Back in my silver clouds is draped across Neptune's measure of soul and curiosity, have we lost apartment a laptop methodically assembles northern hemisphere. an equivalent amount in ourselves? Maybe the galaxies. we just need more time. Or maybe, to put Insomniac nights. I move on to interstellar it another way, we need more space. When I finally return, through scrambled and intergalactic space—to places capable medieval streets and up creaking stairs, a of making even the most exotic views Honking out one of his trademark long vision from the edge of known reality fills of the planets and moons seem ... local. lines, Allen Ginsberg put it well: the my screen. Scrolling up and across, I try These images are sent down by the orbit- hipsters jittering through "Howl" burn for to understand. No, I finally decide, I'm not ing Hubble Space Telescope. Ever since its "the ancient heavenly connection to the deceiving myself. This product of science initial embarrassing myopia was cured by starry dynamo in the machinery of night." is every bit as profound in its implications five intricately choreographed space walks Less hip, but just as motivated, Hubble's as the opening sentences of the Old Testa- during a shuttle mission in 1993, the Hub- keepers tried an interesting experiment. ment. ble has been transmitting an electrifying From December 18 to 28, 1995, they series of observations—images capable focused on a place they assumed would A while ago I sent a draft of this article to of shocking even the most space-weary have the least activity in it. Like a team of a friend in New York, the writer Lawrence astronomer (or visual artist, or theologian, biologists bored with the ecstatic plenitude Weschler (see "The Jewel of Poland," in for that matter) into an awed silence. of life, like researchers dropping a blob this issue). He fired back a passage from of distilled water on a glass slide to see, Carl Sagan. In early 1996 astronomers fortunate finally, something without anything, they enough to have a time-share arrangement selected an area well above the cluttered In some respects, science has far sur- on the Hubble observed what is surely plane of our galaxy and set the Hubble passed religion in delivering awe. How the most apocalyptic sight ever viewed for the deepest focus possible. What they is it that hardly any major religion has by human beings: two galaxies collid- probed was an apparently empty quadrant looked at science and concluded, "This ing headlong. A few weeks later, on my in the vicinity of the Big Dipper's handle. is better than we thought! The universe screen, I saw them—the Antennae galax- The sampled segment—the deepest im- is much bigger than our prophets said— ies, so named because of the pair of long, age ever taken of the heavens—covered, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God luminous "antennae" of disrupted stellar according to the official press release, "a must be even greater than we dreamed"? matter that extends out from their explo- speck of the sky only about the width of a Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god sive center. It was a scene of almost un- dime located 75 feet away." is a little god, and I want him to stay imaginable, orgiastic violence—yet quite that way." A religion, old or new, that serenely beautiful at the same time. Salted The faint beams of light from this tiny stressed the magnificence of the universe through the heart of this collision are more piece of space were painstakingly collect- as revealed by modern science might be than a thousand young star clusters. This ed in 342 exposures over ten consecutive able to draw forth reserves of reverence is a cataclysm so immense and distant that days. Cleaned up, processed, and digitally and awe hardly tapped by the conventional the stark fact of our ability to capture it, fused, these serial exposures finally came faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will let alone understand it, seems capable of together to paint a picture not of an empti- emerge. redefining our picture of ourselves. Where ness populated with a few feeble glow- 6 In the first known writing, Sumerian page. billion times more power. Traveling at the cuneiform, God was depicted as a star. speed of light, a signal from Voyager cur- Text and image, in other words, were once Suddenly I realize that I'm leaning for- rently takes more than ten hours to reach one. Five thousand years later the Hubble, ward, as if I were riding a motorcycle at a Earth. a product of "pure" secular science, brings dangerously high rate of speed. My nose us full circle. It does so by looking far is only inches from the screen: if I hit a Later I will edit images, crop them, print beyond any human language, spoken or bump, I could vault right through—end- them out. Coffee. Morning sunlight written. About 10 billion years before the ing up in the distant past. Or am I already bounces off the snow. A Yugo buzzes by Sumerians the most distant—and therefore there, looking even further back? And how below the window like a fly. I see that the oldest—galaxies visible in the Deep do you measure the nothing in nothing? were they created by individual human Field were still in the process of forming. How do you place something without any- beings, some of these pictures of the solar They were doing so (in the picture they thing in time and space when it's beyond system and the stars would be considered are still doing so, because the reddish light both? A tension is set up—a vibration, as much works of art as, for example, fired outward during their birth took that as we almost grasp the ungraspable, and Ansel Adams's celebrated photographs of long to get here) "perhaps less than one even have the hubris to put a frame around Yosemite, or Frederic Church's paintings billion years after the universe's birth in it. The ineffable presence of this absence of Niagara. But these depictions of nature the Big Bang," according to the Space calls to mind an observation by Novalis: are far wilder. I survey an intricate, storm- Telescope Science Institute. "Philosophy is really homesickness, an racked black-and-white Galileo mosaic— urge to be at home everywhere. Where, five joined pictures of Jupiter's immense Since that winter seven years ago, when then, are we going? Always to our home." hydrogen-cloud belts, stacked jaggedly the Deep Field image was assembled, in a kind of composite lightning bolt. It's space-telescope astronomers have con- In the end, the Hubble's keepers found a picture worthy of a planet named after cluded that no matter what seemingly their emptiness in spades—their emptiness the Roman ruler of the universe. It also vacant speck of space they deep-focus distilled. Above our heads the light cast brings to mind Leonardo's monochromatic their cameras on, they'll inevitably find off by all those impossibly distant galax- Adoration of the Magi, never completed, such an abundance of ancient, glinting ies continues to stream past. The fall of a which dominates a room in the Uffizi fires. Trolling through these multicolored goose feather is like a redwood crashing to Gallery, in Florence. The three Wise Men galaxies (the Deep Field image is so large earth by comparison. gaze in amazement at the impossible child. that my screen can only sample a portion Seated at the center, a serene anchor to the of it at a time), I shake my head. Clearly, As I log off, disengaging from that infi- composition, the Madonna smiles enig- science is producing iconographic images nitely extended yet exquisitely detailed matically. Around them an inexplicable fraught with a kind of religious inten- out there, it occurs to me that the send- cosmos swirls: concentric whorls leading, sity. It does so by lengthening the border ing of commands through cyberspace to finally, to a set of stairs reaching up and between what's visible (and therefore, at unlock the images stored in these deep- out—to the heavens. least provisionally, interpretable) and the space archives is a perfect analogue to ineffable beyond. This beyond deserves the transmission and reception of data to In the apocalyptic gloom of Tarkovsky's the term simply by definition. And as with and from our distant probes. The living, last film, The Sacrifice, two characters any religious icon, or any work of visual updated sites devoted to these cybernetic peer anxiously at a framed reproduction art, the galaxies stacked up in the Hubble explorers are the link between inner and of this same painting. Calling it "sinister," Deep Field are discernible in the first place outer space, between the complex, grow- one of them confesses, "I've always been because behind them is—darkness. Some- ing, ever-changing web at the center of our terrified of Leonardo." Seeking a repro- thing undefined. A place—or, rather, an knowledge banks and its most far-flung duction of Adoration, I click my CD-ROM absence of place—that astronomers have filaments. Together this whole elaborate encyclopedia open to "Leonardo," and named the Dark Zone. structure begins to constitute something find this sentence: "His scientific theories, like the entirety of the information sphere. like his artistic innovations, were based on This absolute darkness exists on the other It becomes, as Novalis said, home. careful observation and precise documen- side of the Big Bang. It pullulates its tation. He understood, better than anyone inscrutable energies before the Word. The With a few flicks of the finger, for -ex of his century or the next, the importance ultimate nada, it provides a deep black ample, I can determine that Voyager 1, the of precise scientific observation." backing canvas for the Beginning. In the most distant artifact ever made by human- presence of this supreme mystery, science, ity, reset its "command loss timer" the Ninety years after Leonardo's death Gali- religion, and art all fuse into an etiological other day. I can tell you how much propel- leo turned his telescope to the sky—and question without an answer. The English lant it has left, and the power levels of its our knowledge of the universe exploded. title for the first book of the Old Testa- generators. Voyager left the solar system By the end of the seventeenth century the ment derives from Genesis kosmou, Greek more than a decade ago. It is nearly eight total number of known bodies in the solar for "origin of the cosmos." But the black billion miles away. The spacecraft's EKG system had more than doubled. Three hun- backdrop beyond these earliest visible readings are so weak that the signal strik- dred years later, near the end of its own galaxies is a text we'll never be able to ing NASA's global network of deep-space life, Galileo's robot namesake continues find the meaning of, written in an ink that antennas is only 10-16 watts—or one part to thread its way among the moons he dis- has spread well beyond the margins of the in 10 quadrillion. A digital watch uses 20 covered. The universe is exploding again. 7 void enveloping the spinning galaxies: it I burn Galileo's depiction of Jupiter onto all serves as a perfect philosophical mirror a CD—a procedure necessary because the image, reflecting back the quandary of the file is so large—and take it to a place full species, the limitations of human knowl- of shiny new machines busy printing, with edge. The frail architecture defined by our the methodical longitudinal whir of high- distant tools, which places the human race speed ink jets, big photo-quality images, at the center of "what's known," is actually mostly for advertising. The guy flicking our own map of ourselves—a chart that switches there is so intrigued by this rag- we'll hand down to successive generations, ing Jovian stormscape—not to mention my who may one day see a charming primitiv- oddball reasons for wanting a poster-size ism, or even an intriguing prescience, in copy of it—that he prints the picture out our view of all that. on a panel the size of a door and refuses to take money. Motoring back on Ljubljana's I park the car, tread through snowdrifts, perilous ring road, I meditate on the fact and climb the complaining stairs. Galileo's that questions of authorship would tend to rendition of Jupiter hangs above my desk disqualify a space probe's pictures from in a beam of winter sunlight so feeble serious consideration as works of art— that it might be coming from some more even though its scientific discoveries are distant star. Is this science, religion, or art? undeniable, and attributed. Yet those same Or some kind of recombinant, millen- questions are very much present in the rar- nial all-of-the-above? Maybe Leonardo's efied art-world air these days. Even Ansel Madonna, poised superbly in front of Adams was Ansel Adams only part of the the eroding topography of our particular time. Like most photographers, he shot a sphere, is smiling because she knows lot of pictures and then selected those few the answers to those questions. Finally, that today constitute the work we connect though, what she might say is irrelevant. with his name. As for these deep-space im- Because that ambiguity continues in the ages, they aren't really very different. It's infinite landscapes beyond—up the stair- just that they come from the confluence case of an incomplete Adoration. of an immense collective scientific and engineering effort and the stark, disturbing beauty of the cosmos itself. What's left is choice—curatorship.

And I would argue that these pictures qualify as art for another reason: their mysterious, Leonardo-esque smile. Who can fathom the mind-blowing idea that, just possibly, some rich, strange form of life may be swimming around under the frozen crust of Europa—a sphere itself in orbit around wrathful Jupiter? And what other way currently exists to leave Earth and look back at that glistening blue-white marble suspended in darkness, a diminish- ing place, a mote finally winking down to microscopic size and being replaced by a larger system of turning worlds? In this cosmic tracking shot it's not only space and time that are spanned but also the sum total of our homegrown sciences, philoso- phies, and arts, revealing, ultimately, a shower of sparks—the universe.

The jagged geometry of supersmooth Europa; the idiosyncratic surfaces of the other orbs floating serenely in space; the pristine interstellar vacuum; the inscru- table emptiness of intergalactic space, that immense, echoing, absolutely featureless 8