The Secret Museum. Molly Oldfield
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Название: The Secret Museum
Автор: Molly Oldfield
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Изобразительное искусство, фотография
isbn: 9780007516896
isbn:
Schmitt’s will need to wait decades, at least, until it can come out of storage. Museums have not yet found a way to display it without damage to the suit and its precious moon dust.
Since I saw the suits, they have been on the move. They now live in their new storage facility, in Chantilly, Virginia. The new facility is part of the Air and Space museum’s sister museum, built near the airport, so that new air and space exhibits can be flown straight into the museum collection. The suits were moved in trucks, a few each day, snuggled into crates to keep them safe. The collections staff considered moving them in coffins but decided against it. In their new home, the suits are stored according to mission.
Now that I have seen the suits they wore, how fragile they are, considering they kept men alive on the moon, and now that I have seen lunar soil, on dusty knees 2 centimetres from my nose, the moon landings feel much more immediate. I wasn’t alive when mankind landed on the moon, so I missed the excitement that everyone who was must have felt listening to their radios, watching TV all over Earth and then gazing up at the white thing in the sky and imagining humans there in space. Now I know it wasn’t a hoax (unless of course the sheets we didn’t pull back actually covered Mickey Mouse suits …).
The moon landings also seem more surreal. The suits are made out of fibreglass fabric, a material that was first manufactured for household items. Cathy remembers that her ’parents had fibreglass curtains, the height of fashion in the sixties’. The suits seem far less robust than I had imagined. They have holes where the breathing apparatus was screwed on. They look so normal that they seem strange. They’re very low-tech, very human.
Seeing the suits has made me feel that something greater than NASA and Nixon must have been at work to get those men up there, keep them safe and bring them home. I’ve read that there was only a ten per cent chance the astronauts would make it back alive. Now, when I look at the moon and think of those fragile suits lying in shavasana, it feels to me as if the moon wanted to meet mankind. Maybe Mars will be next.
[Spacesuits] The spacesuits are dressed on mannequins and are laid out flat on their backs on metal bunk beds five to six bunks high.
[Planet Earth] ‘It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small,’(Neil Armstrong)
[Schmitt on the moon] Schmitt checks out a lunar boulder on the moon. You can see the lunar rover to the right of the photo.
[Harrison Schmitt’s Spacesuit] Schmitt’s suit is too precious to put on display; it is covered in grey moon dust. I also saw Neil Armstrong’s suit, gloves and boots.
[Apollo 17 moon landing] Schmitt stands by the flag on the moon. You can see Earth in the black sky above.
BROTHER GUY CONSOLMAGNO IS THE curator of the Vatican Observatory. The observatory used to be in Rome, but moved out to the Pope’s summer home, Castel Gandolfo, in Albano, just outside Rome, when light pollution in the city made it impossible to see the stars.
I took a train from Rome to Albano. When I arrived, Brother Guy was waiting on the platform. I had thought he might be in monk’s robes, but he was wearing a red waterproof jacket, jeans and trainers. That is because he is a Jesuit and his order don’t wear robes, they prefer to blend in and work among lay people. He was immediately friendly, bright and charming and I knew it would be a fun day.
We walked up through the sleepy town until we reached the main square. It was quiet but for the sounds of birds and a few people chatting in restaurants. On one side of the square is a pink wall which divides the town from the papal grounds. Built into this wall is a door with a sign beside it carved into stone that reads ‘Specola Vaticana’. We opened the door and entered the Papal Grounds and the observatory’s museum. Guy explained that the Pope’s house is 2 kilometres away from the museum, across orchards and fields.
The observatory isn’t often open to the public. More often than not, the curators and astronomers have the place to themselves. However, the day I visited they were preparing for the arrival of 500 diplomats from around the world the following week and there were several people painting walls and polishing clocks in anticipation.
Guy showed me a film he was putting together for their visit. It tells the history of the observatory, one of the oldest astronomical institutions in the world. It was founded in 1582 when the Church replaced the Roman, or Julian, calendar with the Gregorian (which introduced the idea of having a leap year every four years to eliminate the discrepancies in time that had built up over the centuries). At first, the observatory’s telescopes pointed out at the universe from inside the Vatican itself, from a room called the Tower of the Winds.
The telescopes were brought to Albano in 1935. Guy has worked here for years. ‘It’s much better out here, the security isn’t so tight,’ he jokes. He spends half of his year here, researching, writing and teaching astronomy students. The other half of the year Guy spends in the desert, at the second Vatican Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. This is the home of the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, a very high-spec model with an internal mirror designed by a man called Roger Angel. ‘Yes, the Pope’s telescope was designed by an Angel,’ said Guy. ‘It is used for exploring new areas of the universe. I use it for looking at the colours of faint comet-like objects out beyond Neptune. These are the things that Pluto was part of before we realized that Pluto is not a planet but part of the vast band of Trans-Neptunian objects.’ He works there with a team of 14 others.
Back in Albano, Brother Guy works with another team to look after the observatory. He ushered me into the vast library of 20,000 books and journals. His favourite book is by a fellow Jesuit brother, Father Angelo Secchi (1818–78) and is called Sistema Solare, written in 1859. ‘It is the first book I’ve found that talks about the planets as real places you could walk around and have adventures on. Secchi takes facts and then uses his imagination to bring it all together. This book started planetary science. Before then, astronomers were far more interested in stars. Suddenly the planets became “places” rather than dots in the sky. They became things, not light.’
Guy showed me the Mars chapter of the book and pointed out where Secchi describes Mars as having canali (Italian for ‘channels’) on its surface. Some people thought, incorrectly, that Secchi was describing canals, like the ones on Earth, which did much to encourage the idea that there was life on Mars.
Outside the library is Brother Guy’s domain: the museum and its collection of space-related artefacts. There are different meteorites that flew around in space for around 15 million years until landing on our planet. Brother Guy explained that ‘10,000 pieces of rock fall to the Earth each СКАЧАТЬ