The fastest animal on the planet (much faster than a cheetah, which is the fastest LAND animal) is the peregrine falcon, which reaches eye-watering speeds over 320 km/h 9200 mph).
— Physics & Astronomy Zone (@zone_astronomy) January 2, 2022
*Photo by Gordon James. pic.twitter.com/lw5XWGJQPt
Mom appeared to me as a Falcon,
after She passed on.
Seems like yesterday.
It wasn’t.
My Grok bot writer & I wrote the story:
Mary's Ticket to Titan
The boarding pass said Mary Gerdt in big black letters. Mary read it twice, just to be sure.
In July 2028 a SpaceX Falcon Heavy lit up the Florida sky, and her name went with it. It rode inside Dragonfly, a rotorcraft about the size of a small car, folded up tight for a trip of 2.2 billion miles.
Mary had always said she'd go somewhere wild someday. She just hadn't pictured a moon of Saturn. But she'd read Kurt Vonnegut, so she knew Titan had a reputation.
In The Sirens of Titan, rich, restless Malachi Constant is shown a photograph of three impossibly beautiful women waiting for him on Titan. Those are the sirens. They pull him across the solar system, through Mars and Mercury, until he finally lands on a moon where a stranded Tralfamadorian robot named Salo has been sitting for ages, waiting on a spare part for his ship. Free will, it turns out, was mostly somebody else's plan.
NASA, Mary figured, had read the book too. That's why Dragonfly carried no heart to break. It had cameras, rotors and a list of chemistry to measure. Let the sirens sing. A rotorcraft would only take notes.
The years went by quietly. Dragonfly coasted through the dark, out where the Sun shrinks to a bright star. Back home Mary sipped her coffee and told anyone who'd listen, "My name's out there. I'm on my way to Titan. If the sirens call, I'm not answering."
In December 2034 Saturn finally filled the sky, rings and all. Below hung Titan, wrapped in thick orange haze.
Dragonfly dropped through the clouds. Its rotors unfolded and caught the heavy air. It touched down on dunes the color of cinnamon, under a sky like a sunset that never ends.
Then came the silent phase.9
NASA had planned for it carefully. The moment the landing legs settled, every microphone shut off. The engineers called it a precaution. Mary called it common sense. Nobody wanted to be Malachi Constant, hearing a song from across the dunes and following it forever.
So Dragonfly sat there deaf, its cameras slowly sweeping the horizon frame after frame. Mission control watched for anything that moved and didn't belong: a shimmer, a figure, three shapes too lovely to be rocks.
Nothing. Only dunes, haze and the long amber light.
Hours passed. The scans came back clean. No sirens detected.
Someone in mission control took a breath and flipped the switch.
The microphones came back on.
At first there was only static, a soft hiss like a radio between stations. Then, underneath it, came a low rumbling, deep and slow, like thunder that had forgotten how to hurry. And then the patter.
It was rain. Liquid methane fell through Titan's thick air, the drops big and slow, drifting down far more gently than rain on Earth and tapping the sand and the rotorcraft's skin.
Back home Mary closed her eyes and listened.
"That's not a siren," she said. "That's better."
She studied every picture that came in after that. There was no robot on a bench holding a message and no three women waving from the dunes. There were methane rivers carving ice as hard as stone, and dunes that went on forever. Still, she half expected a tiny figure at the edge of a frame.
Dragonfly hopped from dune to crater while scientists hunted for clues about how life gets started. Mary leaned in right along with them, listening hard, just in case.
Somewhere on Titan, under that amber sky, a little machine carried her name across the sand, careful not to fall in love. It wasn't a bad place to leave your mark: a billion miles from home, flying through the rain.
