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:

https://astro0.wordpress.com/endeavour-revealed

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

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…

http://astro0.wordpress.com/farewell-santa-maria

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:

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/poem3.html

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:

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

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

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

We 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!

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

 ————————————————————————————

This poem was featured on the official ROSETTA blog the day after the encounter.

http://webservices.esa.int/blog/post/5/1248

Thanks ESA!