Sunset on Mars Photo courtesy JPL

I have enjoyed watching The Discovery Channel’s recent show “When We Left Earth”. It’s a retrospective of the life of NASA from Kennedy’s first prnouncement to the current day. It’s full of great tidbits and stories, along with reams of previously unreleased NASA footage. There were interviews with all the major players too, Buzz Aldrin & Neil Armstrong, of course. There were the guys from the famous Apollo 13 “Uh…Houston, we have a problem…”, along with the actual sound bite itself (including the muffled explosion in the background!).

Absolutely bloody fantastic. And narrated by the wonderous and divine Gary Sinese (the interchoobs are an odd place sometimes…), to make things just that tingly bit better.

Anyway, I highly recommend it. I also recently had the distinct pleasure, and hono(u)r, of helping my best friend write her astronaut application to the European Space Agency!

The Huygens probe’s first view of Saturn’s moon Titan Photo courtesy ESA

Joanne is a frighteningly talented woman who has wanted to be an astronuat all her life. This dedication, and I wish I had even a pinch of it, has led her to not only become a qualified pilot and scuba diver, but to get a PhD in X-ray astronomy and work as an instrument scientist on the SWIFT space telescope. Part of Joe’s application (and yes, she uses the “e”... she’s a tom-boy… she wants to be an astronuat for crying out loud!) was a series of candid essays. She wrote them, I…ahem…tidied them. For while she is an enormously talented scientist and engineer, the creative writing bit is my gig…

So. Anyway, it’s been a crazy few weeks space-wise in the Brooks’ Kingdom.

We are in the midst of such an exciting time when it comes to that great unknown. We have Rovers still exploring Mars, long after they should have died. The Phoenix Lander successfully arrived at the Martian north pole. this promises great things, until winter when it dies under the crushing frozen weight of several meters of frozen carbon dioxide!

Perhaps even more spectacularly the Cassini mission to Saturn has given us spectacular new images of the gas giant, and the Huygens probe has even beamed back images of methane lakes from the surface of the Saturnian moon, Titan.

When I consider these amazing achievements I’m so proud to be human. This is a nice feeling because we’re so often bombarded with bad news about what selfish caretakers we’ve been of our home planet. I am simply amazed at the thought that millions miles away, on another planet in our solar system, man-made objects are exploring and discovering. I doubt I’ll still be here by the time we get to the serious business of manned exploration of the solar system, but I comfort myself with thoughts of future generations of school children staring in rapture at the remains of our early missions… perhaps a future young Brooks will be a staring at something of the Spirit or Enterprise Rovers carefully on display a museum.

“I wonder what it was like, back in the olden days, before interplanetary travel…I wonder how my great-great-great grandfather, the famous and talented English scientist and author (alright, it’s my dream… let me wax lyrical) felt when we first began to explore our solar system…

What a grand destiny we have!