Twenty years ago today, I watched the television cover of a probe descending towards the surface of Titan, a moon of Saturn, while in front of my house in Utah, the snow dusted a rocker mountain outcrop that I nicknamed Titan – both after the moon and a painting of it.
When the investigation – named Huygens, for the Dutch astronomer of the 17th century Christiaan Huygens who discovered this world – Transmitted his first photosThe painted lunar landscape clashed with the real. The work, from the 1940s, turned out to be completely wrong.
The “Saturn of Chesley Bonestel, seen from Titan”, appeared with other planetary scenes of Life magazine, showing what was then considered as astronomically precise views of the solar system for the first time. Architectural illustrator and Hollywood matte painter, Bonestell would make a career of space art. His work inspired even scientists whose research would make many of his paintings obsolete.
The Illustration Titan is its most famous space scene. In this document, Saturn is suspended on the snow swept by the wind and the brown cliffs and the outcrops. The rocks frame a brilliant Saturn, floating huge, rings almost towards the edge, like the belt of a giant. Part of the planet is shaded, melting in the sky of Cobalt turquoise. The whole is strangely large.
What the Huygens probe revealed – a misty, glacial and dark world – and what the ethereal painting promised could not be more different.
The first color view of the surface of Titan, which was returned on January 14, 2005 by the Huygens probe of the European Space Agency, after processing to add data from spectra reflection.
(NASA)
Out of the NASA Cassini spacecraft, The Huygens probe came down by the parachute For about 2.5 hours before surviving its landing. The crafts of the European space agency remains the greatest attendance of humans, about 750 million kilometers from the earth.
With a thick atmosphere of nitrogen-methane, Titan's sky is suffocated with organic compounds, dust and aerosols. It is a world of seas of hydrocarbons and views of sand and icy rocks. The cold – less than 274 degrees Farenheit – is perhaps the only thing in common with Bonestell's point of view. (The real titan may not be as romantic as that of Bonestell, but he is promising: in three years NASA dragonfly mission Will send a helicopter to explore the habitability of Titan for life.)
The Huygens-Bonestell gap was not the first time that our visions of the solar system have been upset by the data. The exploration of space is, after all, a form of “hairstyle on the ground”.
When the spaceship reached Mars for the first time in the 1960s, the notion of channels built by the Martians had to be thrown, although the subsequent images would show clear proof of surface water. The science fiction jungles of Venus illustrated in Pulp magazines? The probes showed in place a dense atmosphere and a henluized surface. The mountains of our own moon, long described as sharp and alpine, are rather muscular and rounded.
However, our obsolete visions retain value.
In 1944, Bonestell's illustration offered a convincing answer to the question: “Why explore space?” And even now, knowing that it is far from precise, the weak path of the light of painting brings us between the cliffs and verses Saturn with this message: if we remain only where we are, then knowledge does it also, in or near the icy lavender of the shadows.
The enlightened but imagined solar system of Bonestell evokes the sublime, the feeling of being small and then autonomized in front of the big one. Scientists who built the Huygens probe which made Titan real made, in their own way, the same. The two efforts are examples of rigors of curiosity born of fear.
It is not, as criticisms of spatial exploration suggest, a form of discount or ignorance of our earthly challenges. Completely the opposite. The sublime reinforces our links with the cosmos and all that it means: beauty and terror, imagination and does it, the thrill of the discovery and fear of the unknown. Painted or transmitted, other worlds can draw the imagination and at the same time emphasize the value of that which we live in. This mountain outcrop that I always think that Titan reminds me of the painting, the probe, the space “there” and the space that I occupy here on earth.
Christopher Cokinos is the author of “Still As Bright: an illuminating story of the moon from Antiquity to tomorrow”. He lives in northern Utah.
