When I caught sight of the model of NASA’s Perseverance rover, I gasped. Now on display at the Exploratorium in San Francisco until May 1, the full-scale model is about as big as a car.
Before seeing it, I’d pictured the plucky vehicle about the size of a toy, perhaps because of the cute name given to this class of vehicles. “Red Rover, Red Rover, send Mars right over!”
Of course, to survive the harsh Martian landscape, the Perseverance would have to be bigger and sturdier as it hunts for signs of ancient microbial life and collects samples of rock and sediment. Since 1997, NASA has sent five rovers to Mars: Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and Perseverance, which launched in July 2020 and landed on the Red Planet in February of last year.
When we started sheltering in place, I wondered if it would last as long as a voyage to Mars. As it turned out, the lulls and surges of the coronavirus and its variants, and the fits and starts of recovery, have taken longer than a round trip. Friday, March 11, marks the second anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring COVID-19 a pandemic. Lockdowns followed in the Bay Area shortly thereafter.
As chaotic as the world now seems with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we can’t forget the 6 million lives lost worldwide, or the other inequalities that COVID laid bare. There has been backlash to protests against police brutality, book bans across the country and attacks on critical race theory. It’s disheartening, but a reminder that the fight for justice is never-ending.
Next week also marks the one-year anniversary of the shooting in a spa in Atlanta that left eight dead, six of them of Asian descent. Yet attacks against Asian people — many spurred by anti-Asian rhetoric blaming China for the coronavirus — continue. The latest includes a performer in New York beaten up on his way to a show, seven women assaulted in a two-hour spree in New York, and two murdered masseuses in Albuquerque.
I’ll never again stand near the edge of the platform on a subway. With my back against the wall, I’ll scan my surroundings. Longer term, we need solutions that support survivors, improve services for the mentally ill and challenge the stereotypes leading people to target Asian Americans.
Amid the darkness, I’m thankful for the moments of light. My beloved nephew, a pandemic baby, will celebrate his first birthday in late spring, and seeing his development — crawling, sitting and standing — is an inspiring reminder of how life persists.
A sleeping bag coat I requested for Christmas has served me well for outdoor hangouts through the omicron surge, even though I look ridiculous and run the risk of tripping if I move too quickly. A cookbook club I’m a part of had its last meeting in February 2020. In the first year of the pandemic, we met outside and traded pies and cookies in a parking lot before we cautiously held alfresco potlucks. Later this month, in a milestone, we might resume cooking together again.
We usually pick a cookbook to try out together, but I’ll also bake a loaf of sourdough bread. The starter, born during the lockdowns, will soon celebrate its second birthday as well.
Its brethren are bound for the heavens. Perhaps by this summer, NASA will be launching yeast into orbit to study the impact of radiation on living organisms in deep space over an extended period of time.
It gives me hope that like the yeast, someday we too will boldly go where no one has gone before.