COUSIN BOB’S EUROPA
Cousin Bob, as a boy on Long Island,
loved The Grateful Dead and Star Trek.
He bought music tapes, went to rock concerts,
and hung tennis and whiffle balls
from his bedroom ceiling,
imagining them planets, like Jupiter,
with wads of tape for their moons,
including Europa,
which Galileo Galilei, in 1610,
became the first Earthling to see,
his spyglass changing Homo sapiens’ reality.
Often, Cousin Bob would fall asleep wondering,
Does life exist on Europa?
When Cousin Bob grew up, he became
a planetary scientist
at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab,
where he and his colleagues pushed
for seventeen years
to fund a mission to Europa.
Downloads from the Voyager 2 flyby
in 1997 and the Galileo spacecraft
from 1996 to 2002
wet his appetite for answers
to Europa’s biggest mysteries, including
its strange geology, odd magnetic signature,
and salty ocean beneath a thin shell of ice
that Cousin Bob thinks likely harbors
discoveries worthy of being labeled ‘life.’
Today, with a robotic mission to Europa
approved to launch in (now 2024)
reach the icy moon in three to seven years,
and send data back to Earth for careful analysis,
seventeen years of Cousin Bob’s
labor and dreams are coming to fruition
with a payload of nine science experiments
on this one long-awaited NASA mission.
Forever a Deadhead and a Trekkie,
now part of the global Europa consortium,
Cousin Bob muses with hard-won wisdom,
“Somewhere on this planet tonight,
a child looking up at planets and moons
hanging from their bedroom ceiling
will one day be telling me
if Europa turns out to be
all I dreamed it would be.”