U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón is seen at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. on Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023. Limón wrote a brand new poem for an upcoming NASA mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa. In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa might be engraved on the Europa Clipper spacecraft. NASA expects to launch the mission in October 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP
When U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon was requested to write a poem for inscription on a NASA spacecraft headed to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, she felt a rush of pleasure on the honour, adopted by bewilderment on the seeming enormity of the duty.
“Where do you start a poem like that?” she recalled considering simply after receiving the invitation in a name on the Library of Congress, the place the 47-year-old poet is serving a two-year second time period because the nation’s prime bard.
On Thursday night time, precisely one 12 months later in a ceremony on the library, throughout the road from the U.S. Capitol, Limon’s 21-line creation, In Praise of Mystery: a Poem for Europa, was unveiled and skim aloud to a public viewers for the primary time, receiving a standing ovation.
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The total poem, a free-verse ode consisting of seven three-line stanzas, or tercets, might be engraved in Limon’s handwriting on the outside of the Europa Clipper, due for launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in October 2024.
Now being assembled at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory close to Los Angeles, the spacecraft – bigger than another flown by NASA on an interplanetary mission – ought to attain Jovian orbit in 2030 after a 1.6 billion-mile (2.6 billion km) journey.
The solar-powered Clipper could have an array of devices designed to examine the huge ocean of water that scientists strongly consider lies beneath Europa’s icy crust, doubtlessly harboring situations appropriate for life.
During its mission, the spacecraft is anticipated to make almost 50 fly-bys of Europa, slightly than constantly orbit the moon, as a result of doing so would deliver it too shut for too lengthy to Jupiter’s powerfully harsh radiation belts.
Uniting two water worlds
Limon’s Poem for Europa is much less a meditation on science – although its first line appears to allude to a rocket launch – as it’s an ode to nature and the awe it might encourage in humankind.
U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón is seen at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. on Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023. Limón wrote a brand new poem for an upcoming NASA mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa. “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa” might be engraved on the Europa Clipper spacecraft. NASA expects to launch the mission in October 2024. (Gregory M. Waigand/NASA through AP)
| Photo Credit:
Gregory M. Waigand
Except for its title, it doesn’t point out Europa explicitly however refers to its place amongst Jupiter’s pure satellites, and to the commonality of water that it shares with Earth:
O second moon, we too are manufactured from water, of huge and beckoning seas.
It concludes:
We, too are manufactured from wonders, of niceand unusual loves, of small invisible worldsof a necessity to name out via the darkish.
“I wanted to point back to the Earth, and I think the biggest part of the poem is that it unites those two things,” she instructed Reuters in an interview within the Library of Congress poetry room hours earlier than the piece was unveiled. “It unites both space and this incredible planet that we live on.”
Limon, who received the National Book Critics Circle Award for her poetry assortment The Carrying, recounted nice problem when she first tried composing the Europa poem at a writers retreat in Hawaii.
Her breakthrough got here on a suggestion from her husband, who Limon mentioned inspired her to “stop writing a NASA poem” and to create “a poem that you would write” as a substitute.
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“That changed everything,” she remembered.
The solely agency parameters NASA gave her have been to relate one thing in regards to the mission, to make it comprehensible to readers as younger as 9, and to write not more than 200 phrases.
At the Library of Congress on Thursday night time, Limon mentioned she considers the Europa fee “the greatest honor and privilege of my life.”
Reflecting earlier on what the project meant, Limon mentioned she wonders at “all of the human eyes and human ears and human hearts that will receive this poem and … it’s the audience that really overwhelms me.”
A author of Mexican ancestry, Limon grew to become the primary Latina U.S. poet laureate and the twenty fourth particular person to maintain the title when she was first appointed in September 2022.
