 forsaken ~adj. 1. completely deserted or helpless.  orbit ~n. 2. a range or field of action or influence |
Forsaken Orbit || The One Line CollectiveGalileo and I were conceived in the early seventies. We each had a rocky beginning. Galileo's flight plan had to be redesigned five times as delays in launch dates meant the planets kept shifting. And I thought my family moved often. In the New Yorker article: "Annals of Exploration: What Galileo Saw, A Journey to Jupiter approaches its end." September 8, 2003, pgs 38-43, Michael Benson says, "Although the orbiter was an extremely sophisticated piece of technology for the seventies, when it finally went into space, in 1989, many of its systems were already out of date." I left home around the same time, equally woefully underpowered. I wish I had had trajectory specialist Roger Diehl on my team. His VEEGA solution to Galileo's limitations (the same chip that ran Pong and what amounted to a lawn mower engine under the hood), was to launch toward Venus, whip Galileo around the inner solar system a bit to gain momentum and let gravity do the rest. Sometimes the long way around is the only way to go. Galileo's 14-year odyssey came to an end on Sunday, Sept. 21, 2003. The spacecraft passed into Jupiter's shadow, disintegrating in the planet's dense atmosphere at 11:57 a.m. PDT. This is only the second time in history that NASA has deliberately destroyed a functioning spacecraft. Some of the Galileo scientists had become emotionally attached to the "distant robot emissary". Bill O'Neil, Galileo's long-serving project director, mused that he found it ironic that 'Galileo Galilei only got house arrest by his sponsor the Roman Catholic Church for discovering things they didn't want to be true, whereas our Project Galileo gets a death sentence from NASA for its greatest discovery: the prospect of life on Europa." The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's website contained little of the emotionally poignancy of Galileo's Forsaken Orbit. While I have maintained technical accuracy, I have drastically edited these texts to make the narrative more compelling ... view "Forsaken Orbit ..." The One Line Collective - visual artists chose from a book of 38 one line poems (like a haiku, only shorter) creating work that was either inspired by the poem, used the poem as the title, or incorporated the text into the work itself. In April 2004, 22 artists will present the results at a gallery in the Flat Iron Building, Wicker Park, Chicago. |
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