Toby’s Eye :: 2009
Cassini Burning in the Atmosphere of Saturn :: Image–Artist Rendering–NASA
Only three other people including a podcast icon/actor/stand-up comedian, my mother talking about my father decades ago, and a close friend who recently mentioned becoming more emotional as they’ve grown older. It’s happened to me too, especially over the last few years. I’ve always struggled when it comes to animals in distress, or worse their demise. My ability to read about, watch programs about, and see stories on Instagram that show, or describe, their suffering is almost non-existent now.
I recently watched part of the first free episode of Yellowstone because it’s called Yellowstone and it’s supposed to take place in Montana. Within one minute of the first scene there was a highway accident and the horse that was being transported in a trailer was badly injured. When the shocked character played by Kevin Costner got out of his truck and approached his horse, it appeared to be standing in the wreckage of the trailer, still tethered, but severely wounded, extremely frightened, horrified and making noises that were alarming and heartbreaking. Noises I’ve never heard before. The horse was in agony, so I paused the show. I walked away, poured more tea and went outside to sit on our deck because I had to regroup. I tried to watch the rest of the episode but couldn’t. The little I did see was him humanely shooting the horse.
The increased emotion doesn’t end with living things. There’s a documentary series called Seven Days Out. It highlights a specific event for seven days before an absolute deadline, like the opening of Eleven Madison Park in Manhattan, the Kentucky Derby, a Chanel Haute Couture fashion show, and the Westminster Dog Show. The episode I’ve watched several times is NASA’s operation to terminate the twenty-year Cassini project called The Grand Finale. The experts knew from the beginning that it would eventually use up its power source at an approximate moment in time, but because they couldn’t predict the exact moment, they had to be proactive and control its end. Their goal was to make certain that no fragment of the probe would end up on one of Saturn’s moons, or on Saturn itself, and pollute that environment. So, they sent it into Saturn’s atmosphere at seventy-thousand miles per hour to vaporize without a trace. Watching Cassini during its last week, especially its last hour, minutes, and seconds, was like being present during the death of a sentient being, almost like the horse on the shoulder of the road.
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“The spacecraft’s final signal will be like an echo. It will radiate across the solar system for nearly an hour and a half after Cassini itself has gone. Even though we’ll know that, at Saturn, Cassini has already met its fate, its mission isn’t truly over for us on Earth as long as we’re still receiving its signal.” Earl Maize, Cassini project manager at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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Songs :: The Horses and Flying Cowboys by Rickie lee Jones, Bad by U2, Understars II by Brian Eno, I Grieve by Peter Gabriel, and Pink Moon by Nick Drake
© C. Davidson