‘Star Chasers of Senegal’ Review: Between Science and the Sacred
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Loading... - Rohkhaya Cisse
- 21 Feb 2023
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In this ‘NOVA’ presentation on PBS, Senegalese astronomer Maram Kaire assists in the mission of NASA’s probe Lucy as he navigates the challenges of being a scientist in his traditional Muslim nation.
Orthodox religion and state-of-the-art astrophysics would seem to have a star-crossed relationship at best, but they intersect gracefully in the latest “NOVA” special, which looks both backward and forward in time.
The principal of “Star Chasers of Senegal”—and straddler of worlds—is Maram Kaire, a Senegalese astronomer affiliated with the Africa Initiative for Planetary and Space Sciences and a scientist-advocate eager to establish a space agency in his own country. Meanwhile, he assists in projects from abroad, the one at the center of “Star Chasers” being NASA’s most recent deep-space probe, christened “Lucy”—after the fossilized human discovered in 1974, and the song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” The “jewels” the new Lucy is out to observe are the so-called Trojan Asteroids trapped in Jupiter’s orbit, which theoretically predate the creation of the sun and the Earth. Traveling at 15,000 mph, Lucy will have mere moments to make her observations, so it behooves the NASA scientists to have as much advance knowledge as they can collect about the size, shape and speed of Orus. Read More…
