Word: galileo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Though all such otherworldly erupting is dramatic, it amounts to little more than geological pyrotechnics. On Europa, however, tidal heating may have produced something truly remarkable. The formations Galileo spotted last week are definitely icebergs, though less jagged-looking than those found on Earth. Astronomers don't know why Europan ice and terrestrial ice would not fracture the same way, but they admit they have no experience with the kinds of cracks that are produced when an entire world is frozen over. More to the point, the bergs are small, rising just 300 to 600 ft. above the surrounding...
Whether any of the moons will ever be understood fully, of course, is open to question. Before long, however, they will certainly be understood better. Galileo could be functioning until late 1999, with more than 20 passes through the Jovian system still to come. Next fall NASA plans to launch the new Cassini-Huygens spacecraft on a seven-year odyssey to Saturn. In addition to making at least 36 orbital slalom runs through five of Saturn's inner moons, the ship will fire off a probe that will puncture Titan's cloud cover, parachute to its surface and send environmental...
Even before Cassini's work begins and Galileo's ends, other ships could be on the way to join them in the outer solar system. NASA is tentatively planning several new Europa probes, including one that will photograph its surface and take radar soundings beneath its crust. If the radar picks up the telltale echoes of liquid water, another spacecraft would be sent to land on Europa and release a heated probe designed to melt through the ice layer and look for signs of life in the seas below...
...Wilmut, who produced the cloned sheep Dolly, had told the panel that human cloning should not be all owed, since so many deformed and unviable clones would be produced in order to succeed. Comparing the eager bipartisan opposition to human cloning research to the 17th Century persecution of Galileo for his observation that the Earth revolves around the Sun, Harkin said it was wrong of President Clinton to ban all such research, and wrong of Senator Chris Bond to propose legislation making the ban permanent. Freedom of inquiry is too precious to quash out of simple fear of the profound...
...centuries. When he seeks explanations, for example, of the faint glow between the horns of the crescent moon or the origin of fossils, he is nearly a century ahead of the scientific thought of his day. He correctly attributes lunar light to solar rays reflected from the Earth. Like Galileo, he risks ecclesiastical wrath by rejecting the belief that fossils were deposited on mountaintops by Noah's flood (because, he argues, a deluge would have scattered them helter-skelter rather than leaving them in orderly assemblages). And though his mind-set remains medieval, he demonstrates a decidedly modern curiosity about...