Stanisław Lem left Earth a long time ago, or at least a tiny part of him did so. His voice has travelled out into space, and beyond its furthest reaches…
Stanisław Lem comments on man’s flight to the Moon (1961)00:00
6025585610625000 km from Earth
In a hundred years, Lem's voice will reach the system named after fantasy creativity.
Lem spoke on Polish Radio for the first time probably in 1961, commenting on Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space. At that time, Polish Radio was broadcasting on the VHF band. The sound waves of this frequency broke through the Earth’s ionosphere and travelled through space at the speed of light. Lem’s voice can now be heard 60 light-years away from Earth.
In 2019, the International Astronomical Union organized a competition in which 100 countries were given the opportunity of naming celestial bodies. Poland was allocated with a star which is orbited by a planet discovered in 2009 by Polish astronomers. The names Geralt and Ciri won in the vote, but they turned out to be trademarks associated with a game. So in the end, the proposals that took second place were selected – the star was named Solaris, and the planet was called Pirx.
These celestial bodies are located 161 light years away from Earth. They can be found in the northern hemisphere’s night sky. They are not visible to the naked eye, but can be seen with a simple telescope or even binoculars.
The second artificial satellite built in Poland may look inconspicuous – it is a 20x20x20 cm cube with a mass not exceeding 10 kg. However, it performs a very important task: observing stars brighter and hotter than the Sun.
The Lem satellite was launched into orbit in November 2013 on a Dnieper rocket. Its creation was sponsored by Radio Polskie 1 – the stations logo is engraved on the surface of the device.
In the asteroid belt that orbits the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter – there are two small bodies. The first one of them, discovered in 1979 by the Soviet scientist Nikolai Chernykh, is called Lem. The second one was spotted in 2009 by the German astronomers Erwin Schwab and Ute Zimmer – they named the object Ijontichy after the hero of „The Star Diaries”.
Future interstellar travellers will also be able to admire a tribute to Lem’s work on the far reaches of the Solar System. In 2015, the New Horizons probe took photographic images of Pluto and its moon, Charon. One of the newly discovered craters on the surface of Charon was named after the title character of the „Tales of Pirx the Pilot”.