Provided you haven’t been living in a hole for the past few weeks, you may be familiar with the current European Space Agency mission to track down the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, flying out beyond the orbit of Jupiter. It’s taken 31 months for the Rosetta spacecraft to reach its current position, 800 million kilometres from Earth and, until now, it has been in a ‘deep-sleep’ as it has completed its voyage. The spacecraft runs almost entirely on solar power, and as it has travelled so far from the Sun, those clever folk at ESA decided to put Rosetta into ‘hibernation’ whilst it completed the majority of its journey, so as to conserve power. On its way, it orbited the Earth twice and then completed a slingshot around Mars in order to harness the planet’s gravity and propel the craft into the far reaches of the solar system. Once it reaches its destination, the spacecraft will hurtle alongside the comet before performing the risky task of firing a probe, called Philae, onto the surface of the comet. It will then continue blasting though space following the course of the comet.
Arthur C. Clarke’s preeminent text, 2001: A Space Odyssey, bears the marks of more than just coincidental similarities to the Rosetta mission. In fact, there is almost a direct correlation between the fictional voyage of the spaceship Discovery, and its real life counterpart. The assignment dedicated to the team aboard Discovery included such duties as journeying beyond the orbit of Jupiter and launching a probe into its atmosphere, before continuing to Saturn. In order to reach Saturn, Discovery had to make a slingshot around Jupiter in an effort to thrust itself further into space.
Already the parallels between Clarke’s novel and the Rosetta mission are beginning to become apparent. But further depth of analysis is required to really weave fiction and reality into one intangible web of coexistence. As already mentioned, in order to conserve energy, Rosetta was set to a state of deep-space hibernation. This bears an eerie resemblance to Clarke’s description of the condition of Discovery’s crew, ‘the three members of the survey team, who would not be needed until the ship had entered her final orbit around Saturn, would sleep through the entire outward flight. Tons of food and other expendables would thus be saved.’ Although Rosetta is, unlike Discovery, unmanned, the rationale is verging on identical: utilisation of a state of slumber in order to minimise consumption of valuable supplies.
The eventual awakening of the crew of Discovery relied on a computer, which was named HAL. Clarke describes HAL as the brains of the ship, stating that, when the crew was in hibernation, ‘only the essential systems would continue to operate.’ This draws another analogy between Discovery and Rosetta; ESA project scientist, Dr. Matt Taylor, explained that Rosetta has ‘an internal alarm clock. The clock will say “it’s time to wake up.”’ Barring this alarm clock, the rest of the spaceship will be turned off. Although Clarke perhaps was unable to imagine the possibility of unmanned space travel, the premise of his hypothetical text almost identically mirrors the techniques employed for modern day deep-space exploration.
In the novel, once Discovery reached Jupiter, it was required to fire two probes into the atmosphere of the planet for research purposes, which is somewhat similar to the task beseeched to Rosetta. Clarke also, like the ESA scientists, recognised the danger of such a task, writing that after the probes were launched ‘there were anxious minutes of waiting, then, for the two watchers on the Control Deck. They could not be certain that the probe would survive…’ For Discovery, the issue faced by the probes was the potential for burning up as they penetrated the Jovian atmosphere, whereas the Philae probe runs the risk of bouncing back off the surface of the comet, due to the low gravity of its target. Though these issues are not identical, the simplified premise remains the same: firing a probe into unknown territory, at some degree of calculable risk.
Another factor that Clarke identified and utilised in his text was the circumstance that, at that distance from communication centres based on Earth, it would take some time for messages to be relayed between the spaceship and the scientists back home. During a crescendo in the narrative of the plot, a communications antenna on Discovery is reported to be faulty, and one of the crew members decides to relay this information back to Earth and suggest a solution. After his message has been sent, Clarke writes ‘now there was nothing to do but wait for the confirmation, which would take at least two hours as the signals made the round trips past the orbits of Jupiter and Mars.’ BBC News science correspondent, Jonathan Amos, in an article about Rosetta, asserts that ‘the huge distance between the probe and Earth mean telecommands have a one-way travel time of 45 minutes.’ He goes on to quote mission manager Gerhard Schwehm as saying “After 31 months in hibernation, what is 45 minutes to wait?” The accuracy with which Clarke was able to predict the time taken for the transit of communications between Earth and a spaceship near Jupiter is astounding. His prediction that a response would take two hours is in direct agreement with scientific predictions from the ESA, who gave Rosetta an ‘hour-long window of opportunity’ to communicate with them, the exact same length of time given by Clarke for one-way communication from Jupiter to Earth.
Collating all the evidence, it is impossible not to conclude that Clarke effectively prophesised the mission currently being undertaken by the ESA, and he did so with almost complete, unprecedented accuracy: he described, in vivid detail, the method of deep-space hibernation which, though varied from its application to organic matter in the novel, to its application to computer technology and machinery in reality, was utilised to the same effect: preservation of valuable resources; he explained the necessity to slingshot other planets in order to gain the required momentum to venture into the far reaches of the solar system; he explained the time frame for communications from Jupiter to Earth with exact accuracy; he described the risky process of firing explorative probes into unknown territory. Though there are discrepancies between the fictional adventure of Discovery, and the real life odyssey of Rosetta, bearing in mind that Clarke penned 2001: A Space Odyssey half a century ago, those inaccuracies pale into insignificance when considering the technological and scientific advances we have made in that time (we hadn’t even planted a human foot on the surface of the moon when the manuscript for the book was sent to the publishing house), and it could certainly be hypothesised that Clarke almost predicted the future of space exploration; perhaps he even inspired it. Let’s hope that the Rosetta mission ends more successfully than Discovery’s did!
scripturient 