10 5 august 2019openings
I
t took a few thousand years for the moon to get out of its reputation
of being an astral body devoted to ratcheting up the insanity of men,
to triggering werewolves, being an orb with a trapped rabbit and other
supernatural myths. In an age before electricity, on certain days, it was
the closest mankind would get to an LED bulb and—is it surprising?—
that for a species inured to dark nights, the white light should be tied to
the divine—the moon was also a God. and yet even in those days, some
philosophers got pretty close to what it might be in reality. aryabhata, the
Indian astronomer and mathematician, had deduced as far back as 499
CE that moonlight was just reflected glory from the sun and
its shadow led to eclipses. a thousand years before him,
Greek philosophers had hypothesised the moon was just
a round rock with no light of its own. Even they
however couldn’t guess that the rock was
in fact earth, a big piece blasted away in
the throes of the beginning of the
planet, hooked by gravity like a
bad marriage, appearing in the
beginning like a mammoth
ball on the sky within
touching distance
and then drifting away
gradually until it
revolved in
uneasy truce.
Man’s relationship
with the moon
changed when Galileo
and his first telescope
finally saw it for what it
was: dead craters, plains
and mountains, taking
away in one moment all the
enchantment and anxieties of
ignorance, a process furthered
across centuries by the slow
enlightenment of science. Until in the
21st century the Soviet Union began to win
the space race by putting the first earthling, a
dog, and then a human out of earth. the US response was a wild ambitious
scheme to put a man on the moon and 50 years ago they achieved it with
the apollo missions and Neil armstrong’s big leap.
the moon was then just a chess piece in a game of superpower
vanities, a symbol of which ideological system delivered more.
Capitalism prevailed and then by its own measure found the expense
of the enterprise pointless and so called off human landings altogether.the last man to step on the moon was in 1972.
after that long spell, there are now a number of
manned missions planned again. Interest in the
moon in recent times have shot up and our own
Chandrayaan 2 is the latest example of that. the
reason is more than scientific curiosity. there
is the colonial nature of human civilisation,
of course, but it is an instinct that has to be fed
by commerce. the moon holds vast resources
of potentially exploitable minerals and more
importantly, something that Chandrayaan’s
1 went a long way in establishing in 2008, also
holds water. this water, which isn’t liquid but
embedded, might have arrived through crashing
comets and meteors or it could be through
innate chemical processes, but there is one clear
consequence: if it is there then it can be extracted,
and if water can be extracted, then humans
can stay. and if a base to operate from can be
established on site, then all manner of human
enterprise can be possible. Beside mining, the
moon could, for example, be used as a
practice run for operating bases in
Mars. the moon is the first step
to man’s colonisation of
the universe.
Chandrayaan 2 will
land in the South Pole of
the moon and that is
where the sun shines
forever and in the
shadows of the
craters, it is absent
forever. In that dark
zone lies the water
that needs to be
excavated to flag off
humanity’s ambition
to be free of the earth.
It is not easily or quickly
done but the promise
is greater now because
countries are not competing
but coordinating in the
enterprise. In Chandrayaan 1, the
small equipment—Moon Mineralogy
Mapper—that discovered the water was
NaSa’s. at some distant point in the future, the
ugly nature of human competition might still
raise its head to claim its resources but, as of now,
the moon is a collective project in which India is
among the handful of pioneers. nBy Madhavankutty pillailunar r ace
Chandrayaan 2 and man’s first moon landing
(^) PORTRAIT the Moon
Illustrations by sAuRAbh sIngh