The Planets (14 page)

As the magnetosphere races past the moons, it bombards them with charged particles, and makes off with fresh particles lifted from their surfaces. The volcanoes of Io pour a constant stream of ions and electrons into the magnetosphere, inducing tremendous currents between Io and Jupiter, several million amperes strong. Indeed, the orbit of Io seethes with so much electrical activity and lethal radiation that it poses a threat even to unmanned spacecraft.
Galileo
had to wait until quite late in its study of the Jovian satellites to risk any close flybys of Io. And every time
Galileo
did pass near Io, one or another of its instruments would shut down, or act up, or take a particle hit that at least partially disabled it. In the end, however,
Galileo
proved so resilient that it once flew
through
the plume of an erupting volcano and survived to recount its experience.

This valiant spacecraft, beset from the outset by numerous difficulties that delayed its launch and threatened its performance, developed a distinct
personality that endeared it to the engineers who built it and the astronomers it served. Sometime between 1982 (the intended launch date) and 1989 (the year of the actual launch),
Galileo
suffered damage that went undetected until the craft was well en route to Jupiter. First its umbrella-like main antenna, designed to beam hundreds of thousands of digital images and instrument readings back to Earth, refused to open all the way; then the spacecraft’s tape recorder, meant to store data between broadcasts, jammed. Desperate mission controllers worked from the ground for four years to repair and reprogram the star-crossed
Galileo
in space, before it got to Jupiter in 1995. Their efforts not only salvaged the spacecraft, but also prolonged its expected life in orbit, so that the mission was deemed a triumph, even though the communications setbacks reduced the anticipated flood of information to a trickle.

Had astronomy and astrology not parted ways so long ago, some of the
Galileo
mission’s problems might have been foreseen. A natal chart drawn for
Galileo,
“born” at Cape Canaveral on the day of its launch, October, 18, 1989, reflects a strong, even aggressive spacecraft, with the Sun in
Libra for balance, and Mars conjunct with the Sun at the midheaven, adding ambition. At the ascendant, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune cluster together, which lends a sense of seriousness and importance to the venture. Mercury, however, the planet of communication, makes the worst possible angle—a square, or negative aspect—with Jupiter’s position. Another unfortunate Mercury square opposes the powerful triad of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

The chart shows Jupiter occupying
Galileo
’s seventh house, the mansion of marriage and partnership. Surely the spacecraft partnered with Jupiter through its life work, and also united with Jupiter in its ultimate fate. As the aging
Galileo
ran out of rocket fuel for steering control, it obeyed one last command that directed it on a collision course for the giant planet. If
Galileo,
with its onboard store of plutonium, were left a derelict in orbit, NASA officials feared, it might one day stray into Europa, contaminating the pristine seas there, or even killing some nascent life form.

On September 21, 2003, the day of its demise,
Galileo
descended into Jupiter’s clouds, disintegrated, and scattered its atoms to the Jovian winds.
“It has rejoined the probe,” some project scientists said, as though mourning a friend laid to rest. “They are both part of Jupiter now.”

By the final hour of
Galileo
’s odyssey, the spacecraft’s horoscope showed Saturn, the planet of endings, well inside the eighth house, the mansion of death.

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Two horoscopes drawn for Galileo during his lifetime (1564–1642) show his Sun near six degrees in Pisces. While his birth in Pisa on February 15 would seem to make him an Aquarian (since Aquarius is the Sun sign of those born January 20–February 18), the calendar reforms of 1582 moved his birthday to the 25th.

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Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), court astronomer and astrologer in Prague, first referred to the “Medicean stars” as “Galilean satellites” in 1610. Simon Marius, a contemporary of Galileo and Kepler, gave the moons their enduring individual names by selecting four favored lovers of the mythological Zeus/Jupiter.

B
etween 1914 and 1916, the English composer Gustav Holst created the only known example of a symphonic tribute to the Solar System, his Opus 32,
The Planets, Suite for Orchestra
. Neither Haydn’s “Mercury” (Symphony no. 43 in E flat major) nor Mozart’s “Jupiter” (no. 41 in C; K. 551) had attempted as much. In fact, the title “Jupiter” did not attach itself to Mozart’s work until decades after his death. Similarly, Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata was known for thirty years as Opus 27, no. 2, before a poet likened its melody to moonlight shining on a lake.

The Planets
suite contains seven movements, as opposed to nine. Pluto had not yet been
discovered at the time Holst was writing, and he excluded Earth. Nevertheless the piece persists as musical accompaniment to the Space Age, partly because people still like it, and partly because nothing else has supplanted it. To make up for its lacks, contemporary composers have augmented it with occasional new movements, such as “Pluto,” “The Sun,” and “Planet X.”

Holst grew interested in planets through astrology. In 1913, after a burst of reading on the subject, he began casting friends’ horoscopes and thinking of the planets in terms of their astrological significance, such as “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity,” “Uranus, the Magician,” and “Neptune, The Mystic.” His daughter and biographer, Imogen, also a composer, recalled that her father’s “pet vice” of astrology led him on to study astronomy, “and the excitement of it would send up his temperature whenever he tried to understand too much at once. He was perpetually chasing the idea of the Space-Time continuum.”

A natural affinity between music and astronomy has prevailed since at least the sixth century
B.C.
, when the Greek mathematician Pythagoras perceived “geometry in the humming of the strings” and “music in the spacing of the spheres.”
Pythagoras believed the cosmic order obeyed the same mathematical rules and proportions as the tones on a musical scale. Plato reprised the idea two centuries later, in
The Republic,
introducing the memorable phrase “music of the spheres” to describe the melodious perfection of the heavens. Plato spoke also of “celestial harmony” and “the most magnificent choir”—terms that imply the songs of angels, though they referred specifically to the unheard polyphony of the planets in their gyrations.

Copernicus cited the “ballet of the planets” when he choreographed his heliocentric universe, and Kepler built on the work of Copernicus by returning repeatedly to the major and minor scales. In 1599 Kepler derived a C major chord by equating the relative velocities of the planets with the intervals playable on a stringed instrument. Saturn, the farthest and slowest planet, issued the lowest of the six notes in this chord, Mercury the highest.

As Kepler developed his three laws of planetary motion, he expanded the planets’ voices from single notes to short melodies, in which individual tones represented different speeds at given points along the various orbits. “With this symphony of voices,” he said, “man can play through the eternity of time in less than an hour and can taste in
small measure the delight of the Supreme Artist by calling forth that very sweet pleasure of the music that imitates God.”

For his 1619 book,
Harmonice Mundi
(The Harmony of the World), Kepler drew the five-line musical staff with key-signatures for the several parts, and set down each planet’s theme in the hollow, lozenge-shaped tablature of his time. Mercury’s highly eccentric, high-speed, high-pitched refrain ranged seven octaves above Saturn’s bass-clef rumbling from low G to low B and back again.

“I feel carried away and possessed by an unutterable rapture over the divine spectacle of the heavenly harmony,” said Kepler. “Give air to the heaven, and truly and really there will be music.”
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The two Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977 and currently headed for the outer boundaries of the Solar System, further this musical heritage. As potential envoys to extraterrestrials, both craft carry a specially engineered golden record (complete with its own playback equipment) that expresses the music of the spheres as computer-generated tones designating the velocities of the
Sun’s planets. The Voyager Interstellar Record also says “Hello” in fifty-five languages and plays music selected from numerous cultures and composers, including Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, and Chuck Berry.

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WHETHER BY
intention or inspiration, Gustav Holst ignored the established order of the planets when he initiated his suite with “Mars, the Bringer of War” in July 1914. Real war, what Holst’s generation called the Great War, broke out that autumn, but the forty-year-old Holst, barred from active service by neuritis and nearsightedness, moved directly on to “Venus, the Bringer of Peace.” In performance, as in composition, the full suite invariably begins at Mars, travels inward to Venus and “Mercury, the Winged Messenger,” then out again to Jupiter and straight on through Saturn and Uranus to Neptune, where the voices of a female choir, sequestered in a room offstage, are made to fade out at the finale (with no sacrifice in pitch) by the slow, silent closing of a door.

The suite’s immediate popular success amazed Holst, and changed him from an accomplished musician to a famous one. Forced to comment publicly on
The Planets,
he let it be known that
“Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age”—at nine minutes forty seconds the longest of the suite’s seven movements—was his favorite. “Saturn brings not only physical decay,” Holst said in the planet’s defense, “but also a vision of fulfillment.”

Seen for the first time through a backyard telescope, ringed Saturn, icon of the otherworldly, is the vision most likely to turn an unsuspecting viewer into an astronomer forever. The spectacular Saturnian ring system spans a disk 180,000 miles wide from one ring tip, or ansa, to the other. Its vast breadth approaches the distance from Earth to the Moon, yet the average ring depth scarcely exceeds the height of a thirty-story building. In Holst’s day, astronomers trying to describe the rings’ incomparable flatness grasped at pancakes and phonograph records as metaphors, before settling on a sheet of shirt cardboard the size of a football stadium. (Improved measurements have since replaced the cardboard with tissue paper.)

Saturn appears with Jupiter and Venus in a painting of the night sky over Holst’s beloved Cotswolds, given to him at the 1927 festival in his honor where he conducted
The Planets
for the last time. Artist Harold Cox said he had consulted the Astronomer Royal on the correct placement of the
planets for this portrait of a May night in 1919—the year the public first heard
The Planets
in concert, and Holst won appointment as professor at the Royal College of Music. Saturn looks like a mere bright spot in the painting, duller than the lights of Jupiter or Venus, and ringless, of course, since the naked eye cannot discern the celebrated rings. This is not to say they are invisible or absent from the painting, however. On the contrary, the rings sparkle so with reflective ice and snow that they fairly triple Saturn’s luster. All the ring components, which range in size from dust grains to boulders big as houses, are thought to be at least ice-coated, if not wholly composed of frozen water. The body of Saturn, in contrast, is a gas giant much like Jupiter, made of hydrogen and helium, only smaller and paler and twice as far removed from the Sun. Without its surround of ice crystals, snowflakes, and snowballs of all sizes, Saturn would hardly dazzle viewers a billion miles distant.

In May 1919, the rings were tipped toward Earth to Saturn’s artistic advantage. Approximately once every fifteen years, or twice during Saturn’s 29.5-year orbit of the Sun, the rings turn edgewise to Earthly admirers, and withdraw their
flattering light. Even in telescope views, all that can be seen of the rings at such times is a thin shadow line across the planet’s yellowish globe. Such periodic disappearances confounded the rings’ earliest observers.

Galileo, the first to glimpse bulges alongside Saturn in July 1610, mistook them for a pair of close “companions,” which did not move about like Jupiter’s satellites, but hugged the planet’s flanks to make it appear “triple-bodied.” Monitoring Saturn over the next two years, Galileo confessed astonishment in late autumn of 1612 to find the planet suddenly solitary and round, deserted by its erstwhile supporters. “Now what is to be said about such a strange metamorphosis?” he wrote to a fellow philosopher. Perhaps the planet Saturn, like its mythological counterpart, had “devoured his own children?”

Galileo predicted the companions would return, and when they did they were much altered. In 1616 he said they resembled a pair of handles on Saturn, and later he likened them to ears, though he never grasped the fantastic nature of their true identity. Not until 1656 did Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens lay the changing shape of Saturn to the existence of “a broad, flat
ring, nowhere touching, and inclined to the ecliptic.” Huygens published a full explication in his book,
Systema Saturnium
, in 1659.
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