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“Endeavour Revealed”
6 10 2011
Compared to almost-silent Opportunity,
Bunnell rode to his revelation in a cacophony
Of sound. With his war horse heaving
And sweating beneath him, exhausted after their climb,
Surely the surgeon heard his pioneer’s heart pounding;
His mount’s bellowing lungs a’huffing;
The sagging, rain-drenched leaves of the trees
On all sides sighing as he passed by;
And as he gulped in sharp, pine tar-coated
Air, far away, hidden beyond a hundred horizons,
The peaty waters of distant rivers, brooks and streams,
Tinkling…
With trembling fingers combing through
His bird’s nest of a beard as he neared
The End Of All That He Had Known Before,
Did he stop, look over the edge and,
Bewildered by his first glimpse of that
Violently beautiful vista, refuse to believe
Nature was capable of such deceit,
Hiding such a heaven away?
Imagine – that very first view of a New World
Of wide-screen wonder!
Hard not to feel so small when faced
With such a fairyland of geology;
Easy to believe that, in the days after Terra’s
Bawling birth, God’s own hands
Reached down from heaven, dug deep into the
Land and wrenched it apart,
Leaving an impossible canyon behind,
Middle Earth brought to life before Tolkien
Had even imagined it: great, granite monoliths
Looming over a valley carpeted with forests
That splashed up against the mountains’ feet
Like Nature’s own tsunami,
All dwarfed by a preposterously-blue sky
Painted with clouds so perfect Constable would have cried.
With startled eyes wide as a Full Sierra Moon
How long did he swoon over that first view of Yosemite?
Today’s Bunnell has treads instead of booted feet;
It leaves no hoof- or footprints behind,
But twin vapour trails of dust and wheel-crushed rock.
Thus a crazy Mason-Dixon line has been laid across Meridiani
By Opportunity, meandering from Eagle Crater to,
Around and then past Victoria as she advanced relentlessly on Cape York.
Her sky is a cathedral dome painted pastel shades of orange, gold
And tan; all hints, all hopes of blue are banned,
Allowed to shine only for a while at dusk or dawn
Before fading out of sight.
And after each frigid rose petal-freezing night the Sun
Which rises from behind the eastern hills
Is just a cold, copper-coloured coin
Surrounded by a coffee cup stain halo,
Half-hearted rainbow sundogs shining on either side.
This is no lush Yosemite. No soul-stirring symphony of Life
Plays here; this landscape is hushed, silent.
The only sounds carried on the whispering wind
Are the popping of rocks beneath her wheels;
The occasional faint hiss of dust wafting
Over the sterile, fine-thick ground;
The tired, wheezing whine of her gears.
For the past hundred sols she has watched the skyline rise
And fall like an ocean tide, in turn hiding
And revealing just a little more of the humpback hills
That have called to her since she crawled around Victoria.
Now, she rolls serenely to a stop,
Impatient for the view as her horizon suddenly drops
Away like a magician’s velvet cloak, revealing…
Wonder!
Revealing -
Endeavour.
For endless, F5-filled months we have watched all Endeavour grow,
Always thinking “Will we..?”Always wondering, “Can she..?”
Now we are here. We have arrived.
Without a trumpet blare, without most mortals even caring
Yestersol Opportunity made Landfall at Cape York,
Rolling to and then slowly up Spirit Point,
Impossible Journey complete, disbelief conquered.
To her right: Endeavour’s once-meek eastern hills are mountains now,
And even dimmed by distance Opportunity can see
A dozen different craters carved into their cliffs,
The Future’s Mars’s Mt Rushmore.
And dominating all – The Crater With No Name,
That great Barsoomian bear paw-print clawed into the rock,
Sauron’s Eye were Meridiani Mordor…
Behind: the Tribulation Range traces out its gently
Sweeping curve, a half-buried backbone
Of age-decayed Points and Capes, forever out of reach.
And all around her now: broken boulders, rocks
And stones surrounding the open pit of Odyssey, all
Blown out of the ground when the crater was made
Millennia ago.
Every geologist seeing these scenes
On their flickering Post It note bordered screen
Is cursing fate that they were not born a century later;
Imagining they were bounding around
This Noachian Narnia, stopping beside each mineralogical
Marvel, bending down to lovingly run their
Fat, gloved hands across its ancient sides,
Sighing at the sight of flaking layers and plates
Mere inches from their face.
What delicious torture they must be going through…
One distant sol Mars-born children will play here,
Giddily chasing each other around these rugged rocks
While their parents stand in silence nearby.
Hushed; gloved fingertips touching tenderly;
Quietly celebrating completing The Opportunity Trail
Before taking cheesy family pictures
Of each other, standing beside Ridout or sitting
In a line on the dusty flight-deck of the great basalt
Battleship “USS Tisdale 2”, shielding their tired eyes
From the midday Sun to look for the diamond dust-
Coated statue of the rover standing high
On Tribulation’s side…
Look closely at the Navcam portraits of this place
While you gaze at that strange, snake-like seam shining
On the ground just past Oppy’s feet and
Out the corner of your eye phantom figures will appear:
Here, the ghost of John Muir, leaning
On his gnarled wizard staff, drinking in the view;
There: Ansel Adams’ spirit, his wilderness-tanned hands
Resting on his camera, waiting for just the right dusky,
Dust-soft light… And ahead, standing on Endeavour’s very edge:
Bierstadt, half-blinded by the beauty of the scene,
Eyes closed, day-dreaming of the landscapes he will paint
Of this noble, golden place…
If Opportunity ends her days here, that would be a life well lived.
But who’s to say that one day,
When she has grown weary of Cape York’s clods of clay,
And scaled Tribulation’s tightrope heights
She won’t just roll down the crater’s stadium walls
And set her sights on those asteroid-blasted farside hills?
Would anyone really be surprised?
© Stuart Atkinson 2011
NOTE: This poem has been turned into a poem-poster (“poemster”) by unmannedspaceflight.com’s AstroO, which you can find here:
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Endeavour Dawn
11 05 2011
Dwarfed beneath a butterscotch sky
Impossibly wide and high,
Opportunity roves on.
Rolling relentlessly towards Endeavour,
Her wheels turn in tectonic slow motion;
Gravel crunches silently beneath their treads,
Red rocks and dust trapped inside them
Tumbles over and over, over and over,
Would-be martian cement in a billion dollar mixer.
She wears a cloak of dust now
As she ploughs on towards Cape York.
Walking beside her, if only in my mind, I wear
A spacesuit of the imagination:
Rust-stained like a painter’s paper overalls, its
Legs tainted to the knees with sepia and
Orange fines, as if I had been striding
Through the red weed fields
Of Wells’ Earth-envying Mars…
Through the goldfish bowl helmet on my head
Meridiani is distorted, warped.
I walk across a fairground mirror Mars,
My heated boots break through the frostbitten
Duricrust with every half-bounced step –
I stop, kicking up a cinnamon cloud and look around,
Letting Oppy roll on alone awhile
This deep frozen desert is beyond dead,
Death Valley raked and scraped clean of every trace of life,
Only bone dry dust and stones left behind
To bake in the icy sun.
Fines are everywhere – piled up against
Each and every rock, wind sock dunes
Decorate every crater. I watch a gentle wave of dust
Waft slowly across the plain, an ankle-high dry tsunami
Racing across the landscape at a hundred
Inches an hour…
…and on the far horizon, Endeavour’s orange hills.
A year ago they were barely there,
Modest mounds not even a finger’s width
High. Now they seem to reach up and touch the bottom
Of this towering sky. We pause, Opportunity and I,
Terran tourists taking in an epic view.
The shrunken sun is overhead now, painting the eastern mountains
Bierstadt purples, tans and golds, and a spotlight seems to shine
On the Cyclops eye crater which stares out
Across Endeavour from its unreachable eastern side.
This morning we watched the sun rise behind that
Mimas-mocking peak, a silver sequin shining meekly
Through horizon-hugging haze, climbing slowly
Into a cigar smoke blue sky, another glacial dawn breaking
O’er Meridiani’s sea of silent stones
As sunlight slowly flowed over the mountains
In a tide of liquid gold…
Here on Mars, as they have always done on Earth,
Those slopes and peaks call out to us, beckon us,
Draw us forwards. They monopolise our eyes,
Hypnotise us. We cannot look away.
Just as sailors are drawn to mermaids, singing
Siren songs from surf-slick rocks, just as
Powder-winged moths are drawn to guttering
Flames, so Endeavour’s faraway hills pull at us,
Tugging as if they are magnets and the very chains
Of our DNA were cast from iron.
© Stuart Atkinson 2011
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Leaving Santa Maria…
30 03 2011
From orbit you were, frankly, uninspiring.
To HiRISE’s James Bond villain’s spy satellite
Eye you were just another hole, jagged
And ragged of edge, with a wedge of rippled dust
Draped over your sunken floor. Nothing more.
So as Opportunity rolled up to your rim
Many of her backseat drivers confidently predicted
A brief, boring stay, a mere pre-Endeavour layover
Just long enough for our heroine to shuck the rucksack
From her shoulders and catch her breath
Before heading for the hills…
But you gave us views to make
Even the most hard-to-move jaws drop:
Rocks the shape of snapped-off crocodile
Tails; tilted, crazy paving-covered cliffs with
Boulders balanced on their peaks;
Chunks of curiously-coated stone,
Lonely lumps of ancient ejecta scattered
Round your crumbling edge, capped
With pitted purple scabs of What-is-that??…
No wonder we struck camp on your slopes
For so long: with so many memorable sights
To see, the horizon suddenly seemed a dream away…
But you are behind us now,
Reduced to blurred bumps and mounds
In the Rear Hazcam’s view and soon
Will not be seen at all because, at last,
Endeavour is truly in our sights,
Hogging our thoughts, day and night.
Dreams of finding phyllosillicates fill our
Heads now, as Meridiani’s asphalt-flat plain
Stretches out in all directions to touch
The butterscotch sky….
But our memories of Santa Maria’s magic
Will not soon fade. Farewell – and thank you…
© Stuart Atkinson 2011
Thanks again to my great friend “AstroO” from UMSF, who has turned this latest poem into another beautiful “poemster”, which you can find here…
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“Secrets”
19 03 2011
I am very proud and honoured that the MESSENGER probe team have put up on their website a poem I wrote especially for the mission, to mark the MESSENGER probe’s insertion into orbit around Mercury!
You can find the poem on the MESSENGER website here:
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COLUMBUS’ GHOST
20 01 2011Unseen by weary Opportunity as she stares
Down at pale plates of wind-etched, once-wet stone,
The ghost of Columbus glides past, striding
Towards Santa Maria, sword swinging at his side,
His shadow cast o’er the rock-strewn ground
By the low, cold Sun.
No damp deck rolls below him; no
Tide-tortured timbers squeak beneath
His heels; his sea spray stained boots
Crump and crunch through bone dry duricrust now,
With rust-hued boulders, named after his
Famous crew, scattered all around like statues…
Finally he stands at the crater’s crumbling edge,
Stares out across the ancient impact scar
And smiles. The far horizon is as flat as his
Beloved sea – a razor sharp line scored between
The epic butterscotch sky and wide open, Big Country
Plain of ancient Meridiani.
Through his Santa Maria’s creaking rigging
He saw a heaven high and impossibly blue;
But this landscape’s roof has no snow white
Cirrus clouds, no flocks of brightly-painted birds
Cawing and wheeling in the sun.
This dominating dome knows no azure hints or tints;
Nature’s brush rushed to paint all ochre here…
Yet over there, beneath the sepia eastern sky,
Dark mountains catch his explorer’s eye.
The Endeavour range is low, and long,
An island chain rising from an ocean of stone
And wind-whipped dust… and it calls to him,
Beckons him onwards as a strange horizon has always done –
He vanishes, blown away by an icy martian breeze,
Leaving Opportunity to scratch at the rocks
Beneath her wheels, seeking signs of ancient water
On the new New World…
© Stuart Atkinson 2011
You can find an illustrated version of this poem here:
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Seven
9 01 2011
Seven years ago, a few sols apart, two shooting stars,
Bright as falling angels, pierced an alien cinnamon-hued night,
Dropping onto Barsoom robot Lewis and Clarks
Which have now spent more time ‘alive’ on Mars
Than on Earth and have shown us more of Ares
Than even Bradbury dared to dream:
The Columbia Hills, conquered, glowing gold
In the mid-day marmalade light;
Meteorites glinting in the distance
On the very edge of sight;
Rocks the shape of sharks’ teeth,
Fossilised brains and bears; layers
Of ancient stone piled storeys-high
Beneath a crater’s crumbling edge;
Dust as dark as powdered coal blown
Into folds and waves; a midnight sky ablaze
With stars after another ‘longest drive’ day –
And Earth, the distant Homeworld, reduced
To a sapphire sequin that fades, fades, fades…
Strange and humbling to think
The far future Mars will be a true New World,
A world just as wonderful as ours,
With its own poets and pilgrims, generals
And gentlemen; navies will clash on its terraformed
Seas while screaming armies swarm over Olympus’ heights;
Tortured songwriters will sit on obsidian roofs,
Kicking at martian moss and staring into a twin moon sky;
And lovers will stand on a canyon’s crumbling edge
At dawn, yawning, watching the ice blue Sun rise
Through the Marineris mists and ‘kiss’
Through their visors’ dust-etched glass…
As the aeons pass Mars will have
A million Emperors and kings; a hundred thousand
Bloody wars will be fought over great
And little things; nations will rise and heroes
Will fall, Terra’s Tale told all over again.
But as long as a single heart beats on Barsoom
No-one will ever forget the names
“Spirit” and “Opportunity”.
Wild-haired Cydonian composers will pen
Soul-stirring symphonies inspired by them.
Families will follow their legendary routes
Across the lonely deserts of Mars;
Walk in their vanished-long-ago tracks;
Pose for pictures beside Wopmay; edge slowly
Down into Duck Bay to touch Cape Verde’s
Vandalised Stone, perhaps scratching into it
Graffiti of their own…
But for now they are ours,
They belong to us – the rover-hugging horde,
The fans whose hands dance over the keyboards
Of computers in bedrooms and dens, offices
And schools, around the world, waiting
Breathlessly for the next download of raws, all
Hopelessly in love with the rust- and ochre-painted
World that is the rovers’strawberry-sanded wonderland.
© Stuart Atkinson 2010
For a colour poster version of this poem, created by my great friend Glen Nagle, go here: http://astro0.wordpress.com/mer7
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BLUE
17 11 2010
Ignoring the tsunami of technology humming behind her,
The chaos of cameras, computers and calculators
Covering the walls, she shuts her eyes and smiles.
This isn’t what she imagined as a girl.
In all those classroom daydreams she always saw herself
Looking down – or up – at the world from high above – or below –
Beside a plate-sized portal, straining to glimpse
Some small portion of the planet spinning silently beyond
The scratched and fingerprint-smeared glass, unable to see
More than mere hints of the colours, shadows and shapes
Shown in all the books and magazines…
But this…
Earth is there… everywhere…
A ball of burning blue close enough to touch.
Painted on the heavens in all its Van Gogh glory
It fills the sky, overflows her sight,
A startling Stargate of colour in an ocean of emptiness.
Even with her eyes closed she still sees its azure glow,
Feels its sapphire shades blazing in the ink-black night.
In the work-day-over darkness, Earthlight
Washes her face like cool rain as painfully beautiful
Whirls and whorls of milk-white cloud swirl
O’er the world below and she knows, in her aching
Heart, that long after she has returned to Terra,
To walk barefoot on its dew-drenched grass and
Splash in its ocean’s surging surf a part of her
Will always be here, at this window, gazing down
Upon the Earth.
© Stuart Atkinson 2010
Note: this poem was inspired by a picture taken by a NASA shuttle astronaut. You can see the picture, and read about its story, here: And my “poster” version of this poem, incorporating the picture, can be found here.Comments : Leave a Comment »
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When Spirit Was Free
24 08 2010
Five terran years ago today, Spirit conquered her Everest.
Like stone sirens, their songs whispered on the dusty wind,
Husband Hill’s heady heights had called to her since Landing Day,
Pulled her onwards, onwards… Crossing Gusev’s geological graveyard,
That dream-destroying bone dry plain was just the start of her ascent,
Adirondack and Humphrey, we can see now, mere pauses-for-breath
Before beginning her historic climb past ancient outcrops
Of crumbling rock and up valleys bathed in the marmalade glow of sunset.
Stones cracking beneath her slipping wheels, she heaved herself
Up the El Capitan slope of Husband Hill until finally, finally
She was standing in the cathedral silence of the summit -
Beneath her now: the achingly-beautiful Big Country of Barsoom,
Painted a thousand different shades and hues of red.
Over there – a dust devil, whirling its way across the plain,
Waltzing to martian music no human ears will ever hear;
On all sides, wrapping round her horizon – more hills and mountains,
Never to be conquered but no less lovely for that.
And far, far below, Homeplate.
On that gloriously carefree day, no hint of how closely
Spirit’s fate was tied to that innocent-looking place;
No clue that down there, beside that gateau-layered cap
Of stone cruel Mars, envious of Spirit’s triumph, had set a trap…
That is where Spirit stands today, held fast as a fly in amber,
In a sleep so deep not even whales could reach her dreams,
Leaving us to count the days until she wakes and shakes
The dust clods from her weary wheels and starts to make
Her way across the face of Mars again…
© Stuart Atkinson 2010
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FIRST DRIVE
28 07 2010We came in our virtual droves
To watch her rove for the very first time.
Not yet beautiful, or elegant – none watching
Could ever claim that of the white metal box
Balanced on its six fat, coal-black wheels.
She sat there, frozen in the floodlights’ glare
Like a robot fly trapped in sky-blue amber,
Or a captured and chained alien machine,
Surrounded by wide-eyed scientists, shining
Snowman-white in their oh-so-funny bunny suits.
Some standing, some kneeling, others lying flat
On the sterilised ground like snipers,
Long-lensed cameras, not rifles, levelled
At the creature crouched there before them; all
Waiting for it to move, all waiting breathlessly
For proof its wheels really could carry its bulk
Across Barsoom –
Then one by one they were gone,
Leaving the Clean Room silent and still.
Just a single blue light, stolen from the TARDIS roof,
Blinking slowly in the corner…
I watched through four layers of glass, the first and last
Separated by several thousand miles, smiling as one by one
The engineers and techs returned and, urged on by furiously-typing
Ustream viewers – many playing truant from their
Jobs in schools and banks and bars – waved at
The camera from the floor; self-consciously at first,
Then, the party mood taking hold, more boldly:
One bravely broke into a robot dance,
Arms and legs jerking stiffly to our delight; final,
Definitive proof that rocket scientists are people too…
But as we cheered and laughed, behind him
The rover, offended by this mocking of her kind,
Said nothing. And stubbornly refused to move.
Suddenly a veritable invasion of Bunny Men -
The Clean Room packed again as The Big Moment
Approached. The rover, surrounded, brooded
On its cobalt coral mat as stalking techs walked this way and that
Around her, taking up position as the time ticked by.
Gingerly, two took up the braided, tree-trunk cable
Connecting her to her disembodied brain and we knew
Her Time was near –
“She’s moving!” I called out across the room
As, without warning, the black barrel wheels began to turn,
Rolling the rover across the floor, snail-slow at first,
But oh-so beautifully!
“It’s alive!” a happy Ustreamer typed; another tapped “WooHoo!”
As MSL slid silently across the blue…
One day those wheels will roll o’er Mars.
Scrunching and crunching over Ares’ ancient rocks,
Carrying Curiosity, her cameras and computers
Across the Big Country landscape of the next New World.
And each sol they do, back here on Earth
A thousand unashamed rover-huggers will remember
The pride they felt the day they saw her take
Her “baby steps” First Drive…
© Stuart Atkinson 2010
Note #1: Thanks to The Planetary Society’s blogger extraordinaire Emily Lakdawalla for the animation of Curiosity, left…
Note #2: I should point out that the techs and engineers were going on a break when they were doing their stuff; they weren’t meant to be working!
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Lutetia In The Light
12 07 2010
For all these years you were merely
A smear of light through our telescopes
On the clearest, coldest night; a hint
Of a glint, just a few pixels wide
On even your most perfectly-framed portraits.
But now, now we see you!
Swimming out of the dark – a great
Stone shark, your star-tanned skin pitted
And pocked, scarred after aeons of drifting
Silently through the endless ocean of space.
Here on Earth our faces lit up as we saw
You clearly for the first time; eyes wide
With wonder we traced the strangely familiar
Grooves raked across your sides,
Wondering if Rosetta had doubled back to Mars
And raced past Phobos by mistake –
Then you were gone, falling back into the black,
Not to be seen by human eyes again for a thousand
Blue moons or more. But we know you now,
We know you; you’ll never be just a speck of light again.
© Stuart Atkinson 2010
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This poem was featured on the official ROSETTA blog the day after the encounter.
http://webservices.esa.int/blog/post/5/1248
Thanks ESA!
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