Dear engaged reader,
At the moment this newsletter is sent to you I will be in London, where I will be doing the equivalent of the shopping trolly dash but for culture and conversations. I’ll be trying to cram in as many get-togethers, meetings and trips to the theatre as possible, along with a partner-in-crime.
Currently, as I write this, I’m in my home office, looking at frost-tipped leaves under a blazing sun in a clear azure sky. Temperatures will drop significantly tonight (by Irish standards), but right now it’s a beautiful, chilly late November day which makes you stop and think, right now, this moment, is beautiful!
Earlier in the year I wrote a piece called ‘See Mystery’ — which you can read here.
It’s a post about learning to notice the little beauties in the everyday — the stuff our brains has categorised as unimportant. Learning to attune ourselves to the sublime in the ordinary is also a terrific strategy to switch the brain off from one of its unhelpful modes: rumination. Usually upon topics over which we have no control or situations that are unlikely to change.1
Another useful method is to have a subject that evokes wonder in you. I’ve mentioned before that I follow astronomy news because if there’s anything that reminds me that the universe is an astounding (and often baffling) place then it’s the reading about the incredible strides we are making in observing the vastness of the cosmos.
For instance: communication. We completely take for granted our ability to connect to people all over the globe, instantly, and through a variety of means: via mobile phones, video calls, messaging platforms, Discord, IM systems built into social media platforms, and even the mundane landline. This is so embedded in our world now that people are impatient for replies. They send a message and expect a response in seconds, as if everyone is waiting at the end of all these methods of communication for someone to send them a message.
And the wonder of this communication is lost through its ubiquitousness. The fact that we are shooting signals through the global Internet or bouncing them off satellites is forgotten. We can stream videos while we’re on an airplane, 12,000 meters in the air. Now, our miraculous achievement is a method to convey cat videos.2
The reason I bring up communication in relation to my enthusiasm for astronomy, is this piece of news from NASA:
‘NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment has beamed a near-infrared laser encoded with test data from nearly 10 million miles (16 million kilometers) away – about 40 times farther than the Moon is from Earth – to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California. This is the farthest-ever demonstration of optical communications.’
You can watch an informative video by NASA explaining it.3
No doubt, at some point in the future, people on Mars will be communicating via some version of DSOC of their pets in spacesuits acting cute. One day, people will be blasé about this astonishing act.
In case you didn’t dig into the guts of the above story, it leads to another project that NASA is working on: the Psyche mission itself. Not only is this story fascinating it also operates as an act of symbolic self analysis.
Psyche is an asteroid discovered by Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis, on 17 March 1852 and was named after the Greek goddess Psyche. In the nineteenth century, rapid advances in technology and mathematics allowed astronomers to catalogue distant objects in space. This began with the discovery of Ceres (1 January 1801 — a New Year’s gift), Pallas (1802), Juno (1804) and Vesta (1807) in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and began a trend of naming these objects after goddesses of antiquity. Eventually, so many of them were discovered that the naming system diversified quite widely. Psyche is the sixteenth asteroid spotted in that area of space, and is one of the most massive.
To digress slightly, the better-known Pluto was discovered in 1930, and if you were to compare Pluto to many of the other objects out in the Kuiper belt — a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune — or the closer asteroid belt, it’s only one of many formidable presences. Ceres, for instance, is also designated a dwarf planet, like Pluto.
The asteroid Psyche will be explored by NASA, by the above mentioned spacecraft of the same name. The Psyche probe was launched on 13 October 2023, and in two and a half years it will fly by Mars for a gravity boost, and by June 2029 it will be close enough to image the asteroid before dropping into orbit around it for twenty-six months.
Scientists think Psyche may consist of significant amounts of metal from the core of a planetesimal, one of the building blocks of our solar system. The asteroid is most likely a survivor of multiple violent hit-and-run collisions, common when the solar system was forming. Thus, Psyche may be able to tell us how Earth’s core and the cores of the other rocky, or terrestrial, planets came to be.4
When the Psyche spacecraft arrives in 2029 it will map Psyche ‘using a multispectral imager, a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer, a magnetometer, and a radio instrument (for gravity measurement).’
What is intriguing about this mission is that the name of Psyche comes from the Greek word meaning ‘soul’ or ‘breath of life’, and she is best known through the love story between her and Cupid (also known as Eros).
The essence of the story is that a king and a queen had a daughter — Psyche — so beautiful that the Goddess Venus became jealous of the attention being lavished upon a mere mortal. Rather than waiting for the ageing process to mute Psyche’s beauty, Venus ordered her son Cupid (don’t think of him as some cherub with wings, but a handsome god) to shoot Psyche with his arrow and make her fall in love with a hideous creature.5 Instead, Cupid scratched himself on his arrow and fell in love with Psyche. He couldn’t carry out his mother’s order.
Psyche’s parents begin to fear that their gorgeous, but unmarried, daughter might have incurred a supernatural curse, and consulted an Oracle of Apollo. They were informed that she must be offered up to a monster. They obeyed the instructions and Psyche was abandoned on a rocky pinnacle, where Zephyrus—the West Wind—whisked her away and deposited her in a beautiful meadow next to a luxurious palace.
Here, Psyche had the dream life… including a dream lover who visited her under the cover of darkness. She never saw his face, and her only restriction was that she should never seek his identity. Over time Psyche became pregnant, and pined for her family. Cupid agreed to allow Zephyrus to carry up Psyche’s two sisters for a visit. They became insanely jealous of Psyche’s circumstances and warned her that she must be sleeping with a beast, as foretold, who would eventually kill Psyche and her baby.
This idea gnawed at Psyche, and she finally succeeded in lighting a lamp to gaze upon the face of her sleeping lover — only to realise he was a god, and unbelievably good-looking. Startled, she brushed against one of Cupid’s arrows and fell in love with him instantly. In her surge of passion she woke him up and he fled since she broke their pact.
This is the beginning of a long, and difficult journey for Psyche. She would face a series of trials to discover where Cupid lived and win him back. With perseverance, bravery and a dash of good luck, Psyche and Cupid were reunited despite the machinations of other forces. Psyche was given ambrosia, the drink of immortality, thus making her a goddess. The story ended happily with the couple being married and beginning a life among the gods at Mount Olympus.
This hero’s journey symbolically encapsulates the need of the person to achieve understanding through experience. You wake up to rude reality and learn self-realisation through testing your abilities and revealing your true nature. In one of the trials Psyche travelled into the Underworld (ruled over by Pluto) to consult with the goddess Proserpina to overcome one of her obstacles.
In a strange mirroring of the story, the spacecraft Psyche is facing a long journey into the darkness leaving behind Earth (and Venus), past Mars (Cupid’s father) and into the dark realm where Pluto (the dwarf planet) looms. Who know what will happen when Psyche turns her cameras upon her own face? Enlightenment and strange discovery, no doubt!
It’s amazing that in order to understand Earth’s origins we must send Psyche into the darkness to study its namesake. We learn more about ourselves through investigation and study, through risk and pushing our capabilities, and much of it is dependent upon the previous inventions and persistence of our predecessors.
This story began back in 1852 when an astronomer in Italy first spied that faraway asteroid and named it Psyche, and the next phase of it will culminate in the years after 2029. What an extraordinary prospect!
If you want to be reminded of the incredible miracles existing on our own planet, then check out Mark Rober’s recent YouTube video about the maze he built to test the intelligence of his pet octopus.
I’ve long been fascinated by our tentacled ocean-friends, because they are a wondrous species. Thankfully, due to one of their evolutionary turns, they can only exist out of water for an hour or so, or else we’d be ruled by these nine-brained marvels!
As we approach the intense midwinter period, I hope you seek out subjects that remind you that humans are capable of stunning beauties and revelations every day.
If rumination results in a strategy of action, then it’s helpful, obviously. But that’s not what rumination is normally about: it’s the glum carousel of grim monsters circling to an apocalyptic song. When you hear that eerie tune, hop off as soon as you can!
As some of my friends now, I do send people cheerful cat and animal videos private messages to cheer them up. It’s a beautiful side-effect of our global communication network.
I mean, how great is NASA? Not only do they endeavour to expand our knowledge and understanding of space, but they also communicate their discoveries to us via a plethora of media.
Asteroid Psyche, via NASA.
Let me point out again, as noted in a recent Substack, the Greek gods were viciously spiteful when in a mood.