People often ask me what prompted my fascination with astronomy. Without question, the short answer is NASA’s highly successful efforts to land Americans on the Moon. But there was also something else. I grew up in a small town where after a rocket launch from Cape Kennedy, all I had to do was walk out into my front yard to have a great view of the Moon, Venus and the brightest stars in the early evening sky.
This year, I’ve spent most of the North American winter well below the equator in Chile and Argentina; first at an astronomy conference in Chile and then visiting radio telescopes south of Buenos Aires.
I’ve also had time to enjoy the South American summer which prompted me to think quite a bit about the fact that we live on a planet that precesses (or changes its rotational axis) as it orbits its star in a way that afforded our planet a stable and predictable climate over long timescales. A fact that is arguably essential to life as we know it here. As a result, I got the thinking about the role that planetary science and astronomy ultimately plays in our everyday lives.
Are people who live in areas that have a marvelous view of the sky, such as the deserts of the American Southwest, Hawaii, South Africa, Australia, Chile, and Argentina inherently more interested in astronomy?
Chile’s northern Atacama Desert is a veritable haven for astronomy in a way that very few Earth-based locales could ever be. It’s blessed with extraordinarily clear skies and relatively little light pollution. Chile and Argentina also have a window onto the whole of our Milky Way Galaxy in a way that isn’t possible from the Northern hemisphere.
Clear Skies Also Drive Interest In Astronomy
Estela Perez, a professor of biochemistry and chemistry at Andres Bello National University in Santiago, says that her own passion for astronomy was spurred in childhood by the clear night skies over numerous large lakes in southern Chile.
Everywhere in Chile, even in Santiago, we go outside our houses or apartments and see the stars and use phone apps to identify stars we don’t know, says Perez, who is now locally active in astronomical public outreach. Yet despite local clear skies, she says that professional astronomers in Chile still need more telescope time on the international telescopes that operate throughout the North of the country.
Asking The Big Questions
On a recent Sunday afternoon in Santiago’s Bicentennial Park, as people played paddle ball and exercised their dogs with endless ball retrievals, I sat and watched our nearest star disappear behind nearby Mount Manquehue. And I began wondering about the big picture in all of this.
Once again, I was humbled to realize that our short lives are hard to fathom in a cosmos that exists over such large swaths of space and time. And the universe remains largely incomprehensible to even our best theoretical physicists.
These astronomical issues are ones that each of us struggle with on a day-to-day basis. But neither one’s religion nor philosophy can ever fully answer the conundrum that is our existence, much less our place in the cosmos.
Astronomy is universal, however.
Even the most astronomically uneducated look up into the night sky and realize there’s something beyond themselves and this Earth. Dung beetles, Harbor seals and even the Albatross are also all cognizant of the celestial sphere in ways that still amaze and perplex.
We Need To Take The Long View
Thus, I was saddened to read that Congress is partly to blame for employee cutbacks at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, an institution that arguably has provided the public with more bang for their taxpayer buck than any NASA center out there.
“An internal NASA review determined that the Mars sample return program would take longer and cost far more than originally predicted,” CQ Roll Call reported this week. And because Congress appears divided over NASA funding for the program, Roll Call notes that JPL went ahead and announced that it would lay off 8 percent of its workforce as a pre-emptive measure.
Meanwhile, there are Martian samples just waiting to be retrieved at Jezero Crater; samples that could potentially answer whether mars could have ever fostered life.
Observational astronomy also makes us appreciate the planet we have. Earth’s two nearest planets —- Venus and Mars —- are hardly hotbeds of habitability.
In short, even if you’re freezing cold this winter, step outside, look up and be thankful that you happen to live on a planet that remains a cosmic marvel.
