WASHINGTON : When U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon was asked to write a poem for inscription on a NASA spacecraft headed to Jupiter's icy moon Europa, she felt a rush of excitement at the honor, followed by bewilderment at the seeming enormity of the task.'Where do you start a poem like that?' she recalled th
WASHINGTON : When U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon was asked to write a poem for inscription on a NASA spacecraft headed to Jupiter's icy moon Europa, she felt a rush of excitement at the honor, followed by bewilderment at the seeming enormity of the task.
The entire poem, a free-verse ode consisting of seven three-line stanzas, or tercets, will be engraved in Limon's handwriting on the exterior of the Europa Clipper, due for launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in October 2024. During its mission, the spacecraft is expected to make nearly 50 fly-bys of Europa, rather than continuously orbit the moon, because doing so would bring it too close for too long to Jupiter's powerfully harsh radiation belts.Limon's"Poem for Europa" is less a meditation on science - though its first line seems to allude to a rocket launch - as it is an ode to nature and the awe it can inspire in humankind.
"I wanted to point back to the Earth, and I think the biggest part of the poem is that it unites those two things," she told Reuters in an interview in the Library of Congress poetry room hours before the piece was unveiled."It unites both space and this incredible planet that we live on." The only firm parameters NASA gave her were to relate something about the mission, to make it understandable to readers as young as 9, and to write no more than 200 words.
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