
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


A poet can’t sleep. She sits at a desk in a wooden house at the heart of a palm forest, watching the night sky through the window. The full moon lights up the palm fronds, which dance in the wind. She has been tasked with writing a poem that will be sent into space, to another planet’s distant moon. What should she say? What is the message in a bottle that she should launch out into the solar system? How can she begin writing a poem that speaks of the fragile wonders of our home planet? That expresses our hope that there might be other life out there somewhere, in the stars? In the Studio follows US poet laureate Ada Limón as she crafts an original poem dedicated to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter’s icy moon. Her poem will be engraved on the Clipper spacecraft, which will launch in 2024 and travel 1.8 billion miles to reach Europa - a journey that will last six years. We follow Ada’s creative process over several months, from her first meetings with the NASA team, through many drafts of the poem and a visit to NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory in California to see the Europa Clipper under construction.
By BBC World Service4.5
3232 ratings
A poet can’t sleep. She sits at a desk in a wooden house at the heart of a palm forest, watching the night sky through the window. The full moon lights up the palm fronds, which dance in the wind. She has been tasked with writing a poem that will be sent into space, to another planet’s distant moon. What should she say? What is the message in a bottle that she should launch out into the solar system? How can she begin writing a poem that speaks of the fragile wonders of our home planet? That expresses our hope that there might be other life out there somewhere, in the stars? In the Studio follows US poet laureate Ada Limón as she crafts an original poem dedicated to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter’s icy moon. Her poem will be engraved on the Clipper spacecraft, which will launch in 2024 and travel 1.8 billion miles to reach Europa - a journey that will last six years. We follow Ada’s creative process over several months, from her first meetings with the NASA team, through many drafts of the poem and a visit to NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory in California to see the Europa Clipper under construction.

91,297 Listeners

7,913 Listeners

3,330 Listeners

1,067 Listeners

5,576 Listeners

1,808 Listeners

1,729 Listeners

1,018 Listeners

1,952 Listeners

357 Listeners

346 Listeners

363 Listeners

1,542 Listeners

241 Listeners

471 Listeners

59,604 Listeners

3,245 Listeners

779 Listeners

284 Listeners

16,525 Listeners

480 Listeners

689 Listeners

2,131 Listeners

75 Listeners