Word: galileo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...many ways, Jupiter is like a miniature solar system," says Wesley Huntress, a NASA space science administrator. "The Galileo mission should uncover new clues about how the sun and the planets formed and how they continue to interact and evolve...
...STARRY NIGHT IN 1610, IN THE city of Padua, Italy, Galileo Galilei pointed his newly handmade telescope skyward, stared into the eyepiece and gasped in excitement. Through the lenses of the world's first astronomical telescope, four white spots were clearly visible floating near a brightly shining planet. Galileo had discovered Jupiter's four major moons, the first (except for Earth's own moon) ever seen around a planet...
...Galileo goes into orbit, a probe that it will have released 147 days earlier will plunge into the upper Jovian atmosphere at 106,000 m.p.h., its heat shield glowing. Two minutes later, after friction has slowed its descent, the probe will deploy a parachute at around 400 m.p.h. and drift downward, sniffing at gases, measuring temperatures and pressures, observing cloud structures and lightning and transmitting data back to its mother ship. Finally, about an hour into its descent, the probe will be vaporized by the steadily increasing temperatures it encounters below the dense clouds. Its fate, says a NASA official...
...scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (J.P.L.) in Pasadena, California, where the Galileo probe was largely designed and built, the moment of highest drama during the Dec. 7 Jupiter encounter will occur at 3:04 p.m. (P.S.T.). At that instant, a signal that will have been sent from the spacecraft 52 minutes earlier will arrive at J.P.L., having traveled 600 million miles at the speed of light. "A positive signal means the probe has survived the most difficult entry ever and is transmitting to Galileo," explains William O'Neil, the Galileo project manager. "That pretty much says...
...hard to fully accept the articles about the Galileo spacecraft in the papers this week. The diagram on the front of the New York Times yesterday, with its careful description of the stages of parachute fallout on the surface of Jupiter, was masterfully done, but was more reminiscent of a high-school science text than a miracle of modern technology...