Editorial

Taking Birdsong to the Stars

Twin space probes have for decades been travelling into interstellar space and the unknown, bearing messages of Nature, Peace, and Beauty. But what of us? Do we have it in us to be worthy of the wonders of this Planet Earth, and of birdsong not the least?

Silence, round the probe there is absolute silence, and a darkness barely broken by almost imperceptible points of light, as it travels through the emptiness at sixty-one thousand kilometres an hour. Smaller than the head of a pin, it seems, they are nebulae, stars, and distant galaxies, scattered across millions of light years. Millions of light years, dancing on the head of a pin.

Something flashes past, a meteor, debris from colliding cosmic bodies. Then another passes, and another. Events that no one sees and no one will see, but happen even so. Things happen even if no one sees them; things exist that we cannot imagine. The journey continues. It should have ended years ago but goes on.

Grand Tour

The idea of sending a probe to explore the solar system to its outer limits was first proposed in 1965, the year of LIPU’s foundation. It was a time when space had become a political arena, a second front above the Earth’s surface, where America and Russia contested a proxy Cold War. Yet for many it seemed a genuine quest for discovery, to bring images and names to the vast unknowns surrounding us and an encouragement to seekers for peace.

In that summer of 1965 a young aeronautics student called Gary Flanders realised that a rare planetary alignment due to take place between 1977 and 1978 would assist the trajectory of an interplanetary probe launched between those dates. It was a cosmic window, a fast track through space, perfectly suited to what was soon dubbed the Grand Tour of the cosmos. The voyage of one or more capsules out into the depths of space.

Having little more than ten years at that point to take advantage of the opportunity, the technicians set to work immediately, shaping and reshaping a project to launch twin probes into space in turn, and in turn to pass by Jupiter, Saturn, and perhaps even beyond.

They were to be called Voyager. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

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Contents

• Taking Birdsong to the Stars
• Success of Herons in Italy
• The Italian Ornithological Conference
• LIPU and the Messina Bridge

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