Philae and Comet, a very Bollywood love story
You know those innumerable scenes of heroine and hero running in slow motion towards each other? Through stands of golden corn waving, or colourful tulips swaying, to the sound of strings playing soulful tunes? That Bollywood staple, you know? I could be wrong, but over the years I seem to recall Hema Malini and Dharmendra, Juhi Chawla and Aamir Khan, Preity Zinta and somebody-not-named-Wadia doing it. The romance of it all seems to work on screen, but not so much in real life. I mean, I tried it once, but when I finally reached her after many dozen yards covered in slow motion, she slapped me.
Even so, those scenes came back to mind in recent days, with an intrepid little maiden called Philae. On a decade-long journey to meet a fleet-footed beloved, she touched speeds of dozens of kilometres every second just to catch up with him as he sped along.
You know the story, of course, though not because it has been a Bollywood staple for decades. No, this is about the mission to land a probe, Philae, on a comet with the mellifluous — if not quite romantic — name of “67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko”.
Now I don’t doubt that to some future generation that will roam this planet, landing on a speeding comet will seem like a routine, easily accomplished task. Sort of like in this 21st Century, we fly across continents without much in the way of awe. But at least in this second decade of this 21st Century, Philae’s achievement is awe-inspiring and wondrous. Think of it: this 67P fellow is really a craggy 4km long rock. It’s zooming through space at speeds we can barely comprehend here on earth (think of travelling Churchgate to Andheri in one second), on an elliptical orbit around the sun. It is several hundred million kilometres away, a distance at which instructions from the control room take half an hour to reach the spacecraft. The journey to this rendezvous has taken ten years, because it’s involved various slingshot-like manoeuvres to build up to the comet’s speed. And planning and executing it all took several more years before that.
There is something almost ridiculously audacious about all this. All great scientific endeavour must seem like that, I know. But in that notion of audacity, I found myself thinking of … whooping cranes.
Whooping cranes are native to North America, but until several yearsago, they were dying out. In Baraboo, Wisconsin, the International Crane Foundation set out to save the whooping crane, with a captive breeding programme. It worked, in the sense that the ICF has managed to raise the birds in captivity. But then they came up against a rather trickier problem. Cranes are migratory animals, and the seasonal imperative of migration is key to their survival, to their very existence. If they cannot migrate, a captive-bred whooping crane population will soon die out too.
Now in the wild, cranes learn the hows and wheres of migration from parent cranes, who have migrated before them. How were these captive-bred youngsters to do so?
Simple. The crane researchers decided to teach them. I mean, this is a staggering thought. It’s one thing to teach a dog to sit. It’s a qualitatively different thing to teach another species an instinctive behaviour. It’s as if we humans had forgotten how to smile, or have sex, and elephants decided to teach us. That staggering.
And an ICF video shows how it panned out. (Whooping crane migration. Not elephants teaching sex). Researchers began by clothing themselves in crane suits. The fledgelings came to see the suited humans as parents. Then they learned to fly along behind a tiny aircraft piloted by one of the suits. That done, they flew behind that little plane, tracing the whooping crane migratory route in hops all the way from Wisconsin to Florida. Some 2000 km. Along the way, they stopped in the backyards of families. Like a husband and wife in small-town North Carolina, bemused and amused by this benign, yet surreal invasion of birds, plane and crane suits.
The birds learned. Because next April, when Florida began heating up, the cranes returned to Wisconsin, but this time on their own. Back to where they started from. Fully-fledged cranes, that now even know about migration. Staggering, I said.
Think of Philae in that way. In its scope and vision, her journey is just that triumphantly audacious.
And it’s like an cherry on top that the last leg was like a Bollywood routine. Philae did it in slow motion, falling into 67P’s arms — onto his broad chest, more like it — at more or less walking speed.
Then, perhaps overcome with emotion, she toppled over.