On Moon

 

Pragyaan on Moon

New Delhi. 07 September: After playing in the open sun for long hours, little “Pragyan” is exhausted now, and is now going to sleep at his maternal home, the home - the courtyard of his “Moon” Uncle. As if scripted in the Jules Verne’s story and it’s film adaptation, the first Indian Traveller on Moon - “Rover Pragyan” is going to sleep comfortably under a warm blanket for the long lunar night. 

Though I was in no mood to pen a piece, but it is such a historic moment that, I was compelled to author this brief write up. There is a popular lullaby in India “Chanda-Mama door ke” meaning “Uncle Moon sitting far away”. Every kid who is raised during past half century or so in India, knows this song by heart, and it goes like this “Uncle Moon who lives far away, is cooking doughnuts for the little baby. Uncle moon eats in the plate and the little baby eats in the small bowl”… So Moon is so much personal, like a relative in the Indian psyche. There is also a story about moon that it is the home of a “old lady who is sitting upside down and weaving on a spinning wheel”. When we look at Lunar Maria without a telescope, the imagination shapes that “Old Lady” into reality. 

In childhood when I used to visit my maternal hometown in the countryside, and when we used to go out to buy groceries, I used to look at the winter moon during the dusk time, and I was so astonished by the

Lunokhod 1, USSR

beauty of it, that the places surrounding me slowly lost their all relevance. A thought flickered in my mind that this earth which is so full of life is of no value and the lifeless moon is something that I must visit someday as a “Astronaut”. As a child I was so optimistic that someday I will be able to join the ranks of space travellers and will be able to reach the surface of the moon, and life has no value if a person is not able to go to such a beautiful place in his lifetime. Childish dreams… Sometimes while stealing kites on the rooftop, I used to look at the moon during the evening blue-hour, the half moon, as if a slice of flat-bread looking out from the pocket of Cosmos’s jacket. Then one day, while travelling to Kanpur, I purchased two books from Current Book Depot at Mall Road. The first was a Russian book in Hindi “Space Adventures in Your Home - F. Rabiza”, and the other was the Hindi translation of Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam’s autobiography “Wings of Fire”. Later from the same book store I also purchased “A Brief History of Time” by Dr. Stephen Hawking. I was a schoolboy back then, but books like these along with brief biographies of more than 50 scientists and explorers had shaped my childhood. I tried to develop a small telescope using two convex lenses, one big and the other small. It had one drawback that it used to show everything upside down. In those days, while it was easy to purchase convex lenses; Concave lenses were no-where to be found. So I got the smaller concave lens from a broken binocular, and viola I was able to study the magnified image of moon and its Lunar Maria. Such a mesmerising view.

Mariner 2, USA

Recently, just a few days back I was reading about Soviet “Venera” mission, that was first to land on the surface of Venus. Venus whose single day equals to 243 Earth days, where Sun rises from the West and where the average temperature is “475 degrees Celsius”, that is ten times hotter than peak Indian Summer. Temperature so high that even lead melts on its surface. Then a few days back I came across a random picture whose authenticity I can not verify, It was the picture of a tiny black hole that was surrounded by enormous amounts of light, and it’s gravitational pull was so high that it can swallow billions of suns into it. That tiny dot in that picture, was so powerful. And we say that a single human a “hero” is all powerful, when such energies exist in the universe that are far superior than anything that is known to us.

Dr. S Somnath

 

While watching the launch of “Chandrayaan 3” on TV, I was looking at the calm face of ISRO Chairman Dr. S. Somnath, and a thought flashed in my mind that these learned people, the space scientists all over the world, How do they

look at the ordinary life at play on this planet? While knowing in depth about this Universe, it’s beauty and its unexplored depths, do they worry about the every day nuances that they encounter in their everyday life.

Aaditya L1 

Then another image came up on the screen this morning. It is sent by Aditya L1 orbiter, India’s first mission to study the Sun. The image is of the planet Earth, which Aaditya is leaving behind in journey to the Sun. We can see Africa, Arabian Peninsula and Madagascar in that image. The Earth home to so many people, so many ordinary people busy in their everyday ordinary business; And Aaditya is travelling in such a huge cosmic ocean, so much far to this tiny planet and its complexities. 

Looking at the Moon, another thought comes to my mind. Moon is of immense importance to mankind. Our oceans breathes because of Moon, Moon has a special place in the Religions and a mythologies around the world. Poets have written elaborately about it. It is something which every living creature on this planet recognises from the age immemorial. Sun and Moon are the two things that are impartial and equal. Everybody on this earth considers the Moon as their own and can talk to it under the starry and lonely sky.

IMAGE CREDITS:

1. Pragyaan Rover and Aaditya L1- ISRO.

2. Lunokhod1- Space Adventures in Your Home - F Rabiza, Mir Publishers, Moscow, USSR.

3. Mariner 2- NASA.

4. Dr. Somnath's Picture- Indian Institute of Science.