The local DMV office isn’t far from the farm, and I pass it nearly every day when I’m out and about running errands. It’s the only dispensary in Berkeley County where you can get the titles, tags and driver’s licenses West Virginia wants you to have to travel its roads. So it’s a bustling place.
It’s also busy on the weekends, even though it’s open for business just one Saturday a month. There’s a parking lot slot where driver’s license hopefuls are required to demonstrate their parallel parking prowess, and three or four cars are often lined up with their wannabee pilots waiting to practice the maneuver. Even on Sunday mornings, 7 a.m., when I’m on my way to the Shepherdstown Farmers Market, there’s often somebody straining to avoid knocking over the tall orange and white cones outlining the small target rectangle.
None of this has anything to do with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, except that the DMV exercisers remind me of how good NASA’s drivers are.
In the past few weeks they’ve managed to park the James Webb telescope in a far, faraway lot — space number L2, to be exact — 930,000 miles away from Earth. And just this week, they deliberately crashed a spacecraft called DART into a moving asteroid an astounding 6.8 million miles distant.
That’s what you call good driving. Incredibly good driving.
What’s more, the folks behind the wheel are just down the road from Frederick. The scientists who steer the Webb are sitting at consoles at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, at the Homewood Campus of Johns Hopkins University, on North Charles Street.
The scientists who drove the DART head-on into an asteroid named Dimorphos are in Laurel, at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
(I wonder if they have their own designated, head-in, back-out parking slots close to the office? I hope so. There’s no point in wearing them out trying to parallel park before they even get to their tasks of steering spacecraft.)
These people and their collaborators at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency work in relative anonymity. They undoubtedly are celebrated by their fellow scientists, and their neighbors probably think it’s cool to have them living next door, across the street, or down the block. You’d think, though, they’d be recognized more widely, that they’d at least be grand marshals in local Fourth of July parades, or honored guests at volunteer fire company barbecues.
I’d like to propose something to rectify this: Why doesn’t NASCAR, whose race teams and fans relish speed and agility, name one of their annual races for the scientists taking us on tracks we never imagined? It would help bridge the gap between two disparate kinds of groups.
There is, after all, an affinity here. DART was steered into a direct hit on Dimorphos going 14,000 mph. NASCAR has managed to reach the 212.809 mph Bill Elliott hit in a Ford Thunderbird back in 1987 — fast, when you’re rolling on the ground on four rubber tires.
And the Webb telescope’s track is a unique, wavy “halo” orbit that keeps it out of the shadows of the sun and the moon, giving it an uninterrupted 360-degree view of outer space. What NASCAR driver wouldn’t appreciate that, especially when negotiating turns where other cars or debris may be lurking just seconds ahead?
If nothing else, NASCAR drivers could add a NASA patch to all the others on their racing coveralls.
OK, so maybe the idea of a NASA-NASCAR union is far-fetched. Racing fans probably don’t spend much time wondering what’s going on overhead, and space scientists probably don’t spend weekends watching Chevys and Fords chase each other around asphalt loops.
But it has possibilities, especially for the people waiting their turn in the DMV parking lot. Something to tune their radios and ears to, instead of sitting there just fretting about those spikey cones. Something to aspire to.
Oops. Just knocked another one over. Oh, well. Try it again.
Dave Elliott is a vegetable farmer in Hedgesville, West Virginia, who’s reasonably good at driving a tractor.
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