Word: europa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Ordinarily, a body the size of Io should have cooled off long ago, making volcanoes impossible. But for every pass the moon makes around Jupiter, it makes several passes by its large, slower-orbiting sister moons: Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Every time Io does that, the gravitational tug of these nearby satellites gives it a twang. On Earth, the gravity of just one moon is sufficient to cause the oceans to rise and fall in great crashing tides. On Io, the gravitational influence of three nearby moons is enough to distort the shape of the world itself, causing...
First, the Galileo spacecraft orbits Jupiter, surfs its moons, comes closer to Ganymede than New York City is to Washington and sends back pictures sharp enough to find a small building. (None found yet.) This, after an earlier sweep by the moon Europa brings back news that under Europa's cracked and shifting ice cover may lie huge oceans of water--exactly the kind of incubator we look for to find life...
...given up on our own solar system yet. They think Mars may have had a brief fling with one-cell life that could have left fossil evidence behind. Some even hold out the hope that microorganisms are still surviving somewhere under the Martian surface. Attention is also turning to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons; its icy white surface could conceal oceans of liquid water, and perhaps some sorts of living organism. Both possibilities are likely targets of future NASA investigation...
This week, after a six-year, 2.3 billion-mile odyssey, a 2 1/2-ton, instrument-crammed spacecraft named after the Italian astronomer will hurtle past two of those moons, Europa and Io, then swing into orbit around Jupiter. There, if all goes well, it will conduct the most thorough study ever of the solar system's largest planet and its swarm of moons (Jupiter is known to have at least...
...transmitted data in its tape recorder, Galileo will begin its tour of the Jovian system. In a route that will take it into 11 far-ranging orbits during the next 23 months, it will swoop as close as 160 miles above three of Jupiter's four major moons, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede, flying by each of them several times. On these passes--hundreds of times closer than those achieved by Voyagers 1 and 2 in 1979--it will shoot pictures and, with remote sensing instruments, analyze the chemical composition of the moons. In the course of its many orbits, Galileo...