The LAMP mission, short for Loss through Auroral Microburst Pulsations, launched on Saturday, Marc 5, 2022, aboard a Black Brant IX suborbital sounding rocket. The mission will study an often overlooked kind of aurora, called a pulsating aurora, and test a theory on what causes them.
Like all aurora, a pulsating aurora is set alight by electrons (and occasionally protons) from near-Earth space. These electrons plunge into our atmosphere and collide with atoms and molecules, causing them to glow in their distinctive colors ? red and green by oxygen, blue by nitrogen ? as they release their excess energy.
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Everything assumes such an immense quality when you are a child. You are a seed amongst the trees - waiting, waiting, waiting - for the soil and the sun to open you up, to release you from the feeling of smallness. And in that smallness rests another seed, one of fear or something like it - a lack of agency and hopelessness.
My parents were trees.
Especially my father. Every morning as he would get ready to head into the confiserie, I would sit on the edge of the tub and watch him shave. To this day, I cannot feel cold without the sour, soapy smell of shaving cream filling my lungs, an association unbent by time and experience. He had this way of making everything he did seem so big, so important.
And my mother. She had this way of approaching everything with a preternatural speed. She had a reputation of being the best confiseuse in Northern France, but her inborn modesty kept her from accepting any compliment. She broke so easily - at least that was what my father would come to say - yet she stood the tallest despite the weather.
The first eight years of my life were relatively soundless. If I were to go back and throw a ball of yarn against my bedroom window, I probably would have been able to hear it. My parents used to rise together at the faintest hint of dawn and sip coffee, Mother with a novel and Father with Le Parisien, occasionally locking eyes as if to say, "Mon dieu, je t'aime tellement." I would watch this from the thin crack of my bedroom door and inhale their light as if to retain it forever, not knowing that it was a fruitless task, for soon after my ninth birthday there was no light left, only rough blue dark that filled my lungs like fiberglass.
My parents' confiserie was among the oldest in Old Paris, inherited as it were from my namesake, Grandpère Julian, my father's father. It was once said that I was born in the shop, my mother heaving me out of her amongst the almonds and fruits and sugars. It was just the first of many family myths that I had learned to entertain and then quickly dismiss: Julian, you are part sugar.
In any case, I grew up there. If I wasn't in school or at home, I was sitting at one of the few tables that lined the windows of the shop, eating raspberry guimauves and reading. My mother spent most of her days in the kitchen whipping and whisking and slicing, stopping only to deliver trays of fresh sweets to my father, who would then arrange them in the cases with admirable precision. She might pause briefly to kiss him, or to ensure that I was keeping up with my studies (all she had to do was raise a brow if I met her gaze).
My father would tend to the patrons; that was what he did best. He never seemed to tire of boxing up têtes de chocolat and placing sucettes in children's palms and chatting with the regulars over le chocolat chaud. Occasionally he would have me help fill larger orders, paying me with another guimauve. He would wink at me as if to say, ?Don't tell your mother.? I smiled then, because I thought that would be the first and only secret between us.
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