Clear Skies
Page 9
He would become an astronomer.
“It’s going to be great,” Arno said.
And he meant it.
Arno sat at the kitchen table where his dad placed two steaming mugs. Arno wrapped his cold hands around one of them.
“Your mom called this evening after you went to bed,” his dad said. “She said the baby is falling into a nice little routine so she’s coming home Sunday. She said to tell you that she counted all the ways she misses you and it’s more than eighty-eight constellations.”
Arno smiled. “That’s astronomical.” He took a warm sip. Delicious.
“We also talked about inviting the new boy’s family for dinner,” his dad continued. “Buddy’s family, too. For a barbecue.”
Robert and Buddy over for hot dogs. It wasn’t the worst idea.
“Time for bed,” his dad announced when they finished their hot chocolate.
It had stopped raining. Only the gutters dripped.
They headed upstairs, turning the lights off as they went. When they got to Arno’s room, his dad spotted Arno’s clay solar system still drying on his desk. He went over to admire the planets, surprised by how small Pluto was compared to the rest of them.
“Fun fact. Of all the mass in the solar system that is not our sun, more than half is in Jupiter,” Arno said, holding up that giant planet as proof.
“Wait now,” Arno’s dad said. “There are only eight planets here. Where’s Saturn?”
Arno knew precisely where Saturn was. His stomach immediately did its fluttering thing, but that only reminded Arno he could use the practice.
“I’ll get it,” he said.
And his dad watched curiously as Arno knelt to peer under his bed.
More Fun Facts
So much has happened since Arno’s first visit to an observatory.
Tang, the instant breakfast drink, began to be used by astronauts in 1962 when it was added to the menu for John Glenn, the first American astronaut put into orbit aboard Friendship 7 (the Mercury program). During that and subsequent flights, NASA was able to learn how eating was affected in low gravity. Tang sales certainly improved after astronauts started drinking it. This association created the misconception that Tang was invented for the space program.
After twenty-seven-year-old cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made his historic flight into space aboard Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961, the Soviet Union launched the first woman into space on June 16, 1963. Valentina Tereshkova completed forty-eight orbits around Earth during almost three days in space. She was twenty-six years old.
Recognizing that space exploration should be done only for peaceful purposes, the United Nations created a Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. The treaty was signed by the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom on January 27, 1967, the same disastrous day that the Americans lost three astronauts (Roger Chaffee, Gus Grissom and Ed White) to a fire in their spacecraft during a launch rehearsal test as part of the Apollo program.
On December 24, 1968, a famous photograph called “Earthrise” was taken during the Apollo 8 mission by Bill Anders, one of the first astronauts to orbit the Moon. The photo is of Earth and parts of the Moon’s surface. It is widely recognized as the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.
The Space Race dramatically ended on July 20, 1969, with the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon after just over three days of travel from Earth. Michael Collins continued to orbit the Moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the surface in the lunar module called Eagle, then walked about and conducted experiments for around three hours.
Before returning to orbit to join Collins, the two astronauts stuck a US flag on the Moon and also left a plaque that read:
HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH
FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON
JULY 1969 A.D.
WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND
On July 24, 1969, all three astronauts came back to Earth safely.
Twelve astronauts in all walked on the Moon from 1969 to 1972. Their footprints remain.
For more than a decade, tensions remained high between the two superpowers. Both sides were also critical of each other’s engineering. The Soviet spacecraft was designed with automation in mind to minimize risk due to human error by having fewer manual controls for cosmonauts to manage. The Americans designed their complicated spacecraft to be operated by highly trained astronauts. Then, in July 1975, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was conducted. This was the first joint US-Soviet space flight. It involved the docking of the Soviet Soyuz 19 spacecraft with an unnumbered Apollo vehicle that was surplus from the terminated Apollo program. It provided useful engineering experience for future joint US-Russian space flights as well as the International Space Station.
In 1976, two NASA probes arrived at Mars. Photographs were taken of the planet, and its rocks were analyzed. However, the search for life was unsuccessful.
In 1981, Columbia, the first of NASA’s reusable space shuttles, took its maiden flight. The shuttle made space travel routine and eventually opened the path for a new International Space Station.
In 1986, the returning Halley’s Comet was met by a fleet of five probes from Russia, Japan and Europe. The most ambitious was the European Space Agency’s Giotto spacecraft, which flew through the comet’s coma and photographed the nucleus.
In 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope, the first large optical telescope in orbit, was launched using the Space Shuttle. Unfortunately, it was crippled by a problem with its mirror. A complex repair mission in 1993 allowed the telescope to start producing spectacular images of distant stars, nebulae and galaxies.
In 2006, the definition of a planet changed. According to new rules adopted by the International Astronomical Union, a celestial body must meet the following three criteria in order to qualify as a planet: a planet must be round, a planet must revolve around the Sun, and a planet must have “cleared the neighborhood” of its orbit. This means that as a planet travels, its gravity sweeps and clears the space around it of other objects. Some of the objects may crash into the planet, others may become moons. Pluto only meets the first two criteria. It has not cleared its neighborhood.
Pluto is now considered a dwarf planet. It joins Ceres (located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter) and Eris as our solar system’s dwarf planets, along with Haumea (discovered in 2004) and Makemake (discovered in 2005). Both are located between Pluto and Eris.
Back in the 1960s, Life magazine resorted to artist drawings of what Pluto might look like because there weren’t any photographs of it yet. The first spacecraft to visit Pluto and take photographs was NASA’s piano-sized New Horizons, launched on January 19, 2006. That craft benefited from a gravity assist from Jupiter and made its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015.
In the early days, the first astronauts had to undergo extreme physical and mental screening to ensure that they would respond effectively and appropriately to stresses associated with space missions. Physical endurance tests included treadmills, tilt tables, keeping one’s feet in ice water and blowing up balloons until exhaustion. There was also lengthy time spent in sensory-deprivation chambers. And, like jet pilots, astronauts had to see all colors. Later, during the Space Shuttle era, NASA created a new astronaut job assignment called Mission Specialist. This attracted people from many different fields, such as doctors and teachers. For these positions, NASA relaxed some physical requirements. For example, astronaut Roger K. Crouch is a payload specialist, an expert who has trained to conduct experiments for single space flights. He is color blind.
With the aid of more powerful devices, additional moons were discovered around Jupiter. Today’s total now stands at well over seventy, making Jupiter the planet with the highest number of moons in our solar system. Astro
nomers believe that, because of its strong gravitational pull, Jupiter has saved Earth from many impacts from cosmic debris.
As scientists continue to strive to understand our universe, the countdown has just begun. Astronomers use ever more powerful telescopes and other devices to search for objects that might strike Earth. They use them to predict solar flares that could knock out our power grids. They use them to search for exoplanets and perhaps even to discover alien life.
All the while, NASA is once again forecasting crewed missions, only this time the plans are for returning to the Moon to establish a permanent outpost, landing on an asteroid and orbiting Mars, all by 2035.
Perhaps you’ll be on one of these missions!
Or perhaps you’ll make an unimaginable discovery in deep space through even more sophisticated telescopes than we have today.
Clear skies!
Acknowledgments
I was encouraged to write this novel by the late Sheila Barry, who edited seven of my previous books. She told me that Arno Creelman was one of her favorite characters in The Spotted Dog Last Seen and The Missing Dog Is Spotted. In both of those novels, he’s an old man who used to work in a planetarium and had an extensive astronomy library. Together, we wondered what Arno might have been like as a young boy.
Sheila never got the opportunity to read the manuscript. I was too late.
My mom, Mary Ronaldson, helped me with the 1960s cultural references. During a recent visit, she told me that when she was growing up on a farm on the prairies in Alberta, it felt as if she could practically reach out and pluck the stars from the sky. Now when she looks up, she can no longer see them because of her failing vision. It makes me appreciate the beauty of the night sky all the more.
I’d like to thank the readers who kindly shared their feedback on early versions. My husband, Peter Kerrin, read the first version for me and provided much encouragement, as always. He is my Polaris, my very own North Star who unfailingly provides guidance whenever I’m feeling lost. Incidentally, he built his own telescope from scratch when he was a boy.
Early readers also include Charles Follini and his class at Fountain Academy of the Sacred Heart (Halifax, Nova Scotia) and Michele MacKinnon and her class at H. M. MacDonald Elementary School (Antigonish, Nova Scotia).
Although this is a work of fiction, I attempted to include accurate scientific references. For that, I thank John A. Read, telescope operator at the Burke-Gaffney Observatory in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and author of several astronomy-related books, as well as Patrick Kelly, lecturer and editor of Observer’s Handbook, Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (2007–11). Both read versions of this manuscript and provided their valuable advice. If there are errors, I would have inadvertently introduced them in the final version. My apologies to astronomers and astronauts everywhere.
I also greatly benefited from taking Douglas (Tony) Schellinck’s course called “Guide to Observing the Night Sky with Binoculars,” which included some winter star parties in the environs surrounding Halifax, and from attending meetings of the Royal Astronomy Society of Canada (Halifax Centre) where Tony and other members shared their wealth of expertise and jaw-dropping photography. That was me in the back row.
I am most grateful to Shelley Tanaka, who stepped in to help shape and edit this work. She served as editor on a number of novels I admired by other authors, and so I was very pleased to benefit from her expertise. Her constellation of editing notes, comments and penciled-in smiley faces were stellar. I would like to thank Michael Solomon for the design of this book, Emma Sakamoto for her notebook interpretations of Arno’s Deep Thoughts, and Katy Dockrill for her cover illustration.
I’ve seen photographs of astronauts who wore cowboy boots. This includes Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian astronaut to walk in space, as well as American Gene Cernan, the last astronaut to walk on the Moon during that pioneering era. I don’t know if John Glenn ever wore cowboy boots, but he was a childhood hero to me and he was kind enough to sign Martin Bridge: Ready for Takeoff! — my first-ever published children’s book, which featured a boy with a rocket on its cover.
Arno’s astronomy hero, Jean Slayter-Appleton, was inspired by Helen Sawyer Hogg (1905–1993). She was a Canadian astronomer and the first female president of several astronomical organizations, having conducted pioneering research into variable stars (stars with fluctuating brightness) and globular star clusters (sphere-shaped formations of stars and the oldest parts of our galaxy) in a time when many universities would not award scientific degrees to women. Hogg found creative ways to continue her career, such as bringing her baby daughter to the observatory at night while she worked. She was also known for her popular weekly column “With the Stars,” which was published in the Toronto Star. She believed the stars belong to everyone and authored a book by that name.
I only vaguely remember the landing of Apollo 11 because I was quite young at that time. However, I grew up with Star Trek and then Star Wars and all the space movies that followed. I confess I was inspired by Captain Kirk and the idea of space travel. And, like Buddy, I thought I might become an astronaut until I was forced to wear glasses way back in grade two.
Still, I hope to one day witness a crew landing on Mars, for surely the first Moon landing and the first Mars landing would serve well as my life’s astronomical bookends.
Jessica Scott Kerrin is the author of The Things Owen Wrote, The Spotted Dog Last Seen (finalist for the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award and the John Spray Mystery Award) and The Missing Dog Is Spotted. She is also the author of the picture book The Better Tree Fort (illustrated by Qin Leng), and is known for the Lobster Chronicles series and the bestselling Martin Bridge series. Her novels have been translated into French, Turkish, Russian, Swedish and Slovenian.
Born and raised in Alberta, Jessica now lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Visit jessicascottkerrin.com or follow her @JessicaKerrin.