NASA Sent a Telescope Towards L2 One Week Before NANDI’s Launch

Today, I am sad, excited, jealous, and a little scared.

I started writing my forthcoming novel around December 2019. At the beginning, the book started directly from the space where my protagonist had just woken up from a deep sleep and was trying to understand what was happening around him. But that was the first draft, and as we all know, first drafts are usually crap. After a few thorough revisions and one entire scrapped draft, I realized the exact story that I wanted to tell and how I wanted to start it.

In order to write a science fiction story, I had to do proper research about 100s of space science stuff. One of the most important things was understanding and learning how a space telescope actually works. This brought me close to learning about Lagrange points and, more importantly, the second Lagrange point.

Now, if you were spending the weekend with your siblings or watching some new toxic movie in the theater and were not up to date, let me help you out with one of the biggest space news stories of this month.

On August 30, NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The new telescope is currently traveling towards a quasi-halo orbit around L2, which is approximately 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.

After seeing the footage on NASA’s Instagram account and then reading about it, my first reaction was: “WAOO! That’s amazing!”

My second reaction was: “Fuck!”

My third reaction was: “Why does this always happen with me?”

My fourth reaction was: “Let’s shoot an Instagram reel and write a personal essay on it.”

So, after shooting and editing an Instagram reel about NASA’s Nancy Grace Telescope, here I am blabbering my heart out.

See, I always believe one thing — a book is always older than its publication date. That’s why I started this personal essay with the date. As a reader myself, I understand that readers meet the book when it appears online or reaches a bookstore, but the writer remembers a different timeline. We remember the first draft, the deleted chapters, the late-night research, and some personal anecdotes that no one- I mean, no one in the whole world knows about!

I followed the exact same path.

I had an idea, researched it, and… and I used L2 as a key reference point in my novel, NANDI: Mission to JAVI-1517.

How did I come to L2?

No, not by luck or coincidence. I was researching the Hubble Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. I studied James Webb’s location in space. I found multiple videos and research papers on it. It all led me to L2 because it made scientific sense for the story. The fact that L2 also sounded futuristic to me was simply a bonus for a futuristic science fiction novel.

I also understand one thing: NASA’s Roman itself was planned and built over many years.

And for me, the coincidence lies somewhere else.

In my book, I used L2. Plain and simple.

And that’s what made me sad today.

When someone reads my book in October and finds L2 there, they will first think of Roman, which is absolutely okay. But they might assume that the conversation was inspired by a news story published a few weeks earlier, which made me sad and even scared.

And jealous? Because NASA got to make L2 a headline one week before I could introduce it to my readers.

A difference of one week can completely change the story people tell themselves about where an idea came from. And there are only two people in the whole world who know about L2 in NANDI. My editor, who helped me refine my book, and Shivani, who has read the story from beginning to end more times than I can count.

But… but… the same news of NASA sending a telescope made me happy as well because the research had taken me to a sensible answer. When I asked where a future telescope could belong in my novel, I reached a location that real astronomy continues to find useful.

And for a writer who attempted science fiction for the first time, who is not a scientist, that feeling matters a lot!

I have seen people often using the phrase, ‘fiction becomes reality.’ L2 was real before NANDI; even Roman was real before NANDI, and the science that NASA used was real long before I got the publication deal.

So today, I am still a little sad, slightly jealous, and honestly, a little scared. But more than anything, I am excited for you to finally read the story I began writing in December 2019. If you read this far, go and pre-order my novel, no?