The Explorer
Some half a billion kilometres from earth, deep in the dark expanse, as she neared that celestial crimson sphere, Perseverance must have felt it to be a dream. One of those moments, rare moments, that don’t quite feel real, where we stand confounded at our own existence; bewildered by the place from which we came, the place in which we are, and the dizzying duration between those two singularities.
I felt it too.
Not because I was hurling toward a distant planet at 10,000 miles an hour, five times faster than a speeding bullet, preparing for entry into the alien atmosphere; but because my daughter had come home and told me to witness it.
“Did they do it? Did they land?”
“Did who land?”
“On Mars. They are trying to land on Mars!”
It was Feb. 18 and Stella had just returned from school, her eyes filled with the purest form of fervour, the kind that can only truly come from a child. Her teacher had told her about the NASA Perseverance Rover, which was due on Mars in mere minutes.
By the time she came home, the rover’s pod had already shed its excess cargo of fuel tanks and solar panels, those loyal relics now doomed to wander the cosmos forever. The blood-red landscape would have been immense in the rover’s vision and her pod would have begun to shake from the terrible turbulence. In the darkness of her vessel, she might have heard the squeaking of instruments as the 1,300-degree fire folded around her heat shield. In those nightmarish minutes, she might have remembered that less than half of all missions to this barren planet ever made it “alive”, whatever that word means for a machine.
“Did they land yet?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you find out? Turn on the television!”
My daughter, my little girl, this tall wonder, when did she travel so far? How could my firstborn be pointing her finger to the universe, telling me to look? How could this beautiful girl be the one doing the pointing, when it is I who drove her to the hospital 12 years ago, when she herself was in the belly of her mother, in her own darkness, racing toward a new world of her own.
My sense of wonder, awoken, after being numbed by the many months of lockdowns and quarantines, was equally in awe of both their journeys. Both never having a choice on where they landed, both standing on the precipice of going places they’ve never been, and both miracles that I was there to witness, each in their own way.
I turned on the television. The news said the rover would have landed by now, but the great distance and the speed limit of light meant it would be 11 minutes until we received confirmation. If an observer on the Martian ground looked up, I thought, they would have seen what looked like a comet crossing the copper sky, and then, out of nowhere, a red parachute bloom over the sun, like a giant jellyfish. It would have swum down gently, clutching the precious cargo in its tentacles until the rover took one last leap and punched a patch of dirt. Engulfed by a cloud of dust, for a moment it may have seemed she was doomed to these embryonic surroundings, until that orange mist cleared, unveiling an empty world. As her aluminum wheels gripped the Mars sand, she might have felt sad, nostalgic, for it would have been so similar to the red dirt from where she came, in the bauxite mines here on earth, where the puzzle of her DNA begun its construction.
The news finally came through: Perseverance had landed.
“Stella, they did it!”
I almost missed the historic event, and if it hadn’t been for my daughter I’d probably still be in pandemic doldrums, staring at my shoes. That night I went to check in on her after she went to sleep, and noticed that she kept the blinds in her room open, with the pink streetlight coming through.
Maybe Stella laid down in her bed that night and glanced up to look for that tiny red dot, and maybe 500 million kilometres away, the sun had gone down there too, and that other explorer stood amid a dark desert, in the lonely wind, searching that black canopy for a blue evening star.
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