The Juno Mission
Something to remember from a writer’s perspective
That headline caught my attention especially because my son is learning about the universe in school and is very fascinated by the lesson. He keeps popping up questions and it is a joy to sit with him and search the web for answers to his questions. In that process we have been left amazed by the amount of research that has gone in, in understanding the world we live in and beyond.
The headline this morning also brought up some important life lessons that cannot be ignored —
TIME, PATIENCE & UNCERTAINTY.
Every piece of research on space is the result of years of hard work. The Juno Mission is no exception. The scientists who have been working on Juno have worked hard and for so long planning the mission, designing and building the equipment, testing it for accuracy probably several times, sorting out defects and may be much more that what my mind can imagine. All this with no certainty of the final result. No one knew when they started if Juno would become a reality one day and even reach Jupiter as planned.
The decision to implement the mission was taken way back in 2005.
Some of us might have read about it in the news and gone back to our jobs. Nothing much to see.
However the Juno mission team went back to work on something that was going to take a very long time to materialise. Once it got launched, they must have monitored its movements carefully for five long years. Whether it would successfully reach Jupiter’s orbit, no one knew for sure. It was a long wait.
More than ten years later, we sit up and watch the news to learn about the success of the mission. Imagine the thrill the team would have felt when Juno made it to Jupiter. Nothing could more satisfying than a good result after a long period of hard work and challenges.
Something to remember:
As I write this I think of all the emerging writers like me, who are waiting for our work to be recognised and read. Writing does not pay too well, yet we keep writing holding on to the hope that someday we will get to the surface and people will look for our writing and read it.
The Juno mission is a reminder that patience and perseverance definitely pays off. Yeah the Juno mission no doubt is much bigger than what we are. We are so minuscule in comparison. But the drive to achieve is something that we share with all those who were involved in the mission. We must do what we got to do, but we must do it the best way possible. The result is not really in our hands, but the efforts are completely in our hands.
