Word: galileo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Until we go get our feet wet, there's no way of knowing for sure if the underground oceans actually exist. But when the spacecraft Galileo passed by these moons, it encountered strong disturbances in Jupiter's magnetic field -- too much to come from their cores, but just right for a highly conductive saltwater sea. Something 60 miles below the ice and about six miles deep, assuming they are as salty as their earthbound counterparts. You know, of course, what salt water means. "One could expect life in such oceans," said geophysicist Krishan Khurana, the lead author of the research...
...assumed they were either the pulverized remains of a small moon that had been destroyed by a collision or the raw material of an incipient moon that had never had the gravitational muscle to pull itself together. Last week they reached a different conclusion. New images returned by the Galileo spacecraft reveal that the fairy-dust bands are debris blasted into space when the planet's four innermost moons were struck by meteors...
...were analyzed. They showed that the ring material indeed appears to flow from the rump end of the moons, and that the moons and rings orbit the planet at identical angles. "We have a definitive answer to the origin of this ring system," says Michael Belton, leader of the Galileo imaging team...
...GALILEO GALILEI Empirically confirms that the earth moves around the sun. Is forced to recant and sentenced to house arrest...
...Galileo has completed its original planned tour of the Jovian system and is on a two-year extended mission to study several of Jupiter's moons. Six other flybys of Europa are scheduled before the sturdy spacecraft, which left Earth almost nine years ago, at last shuts down in December 1999. On one pass, Galileo will observe Europa from an angle that will allow scientists to look for telltale volcanic plumes rising from its edge. If found, they'll indicate that the moon is warmer than it seems--and an even likelier incubator for extraterrestrial life...