Word: galileo
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...shouldn't be. Man's fascination with other worlds is as old as Western civilization. Galileo's discovery that they actually existed--that at least some of the pinpoints of light that wandered throughout the night sky had mountains and moons--set off a centuries-long quest to discover new planets. The first great success came in 1781, when William Herschel found Uranus. Then came the discovery of Neptune by Johann Galle in 1846. Eventually, the notion of otherworldly life made the transition out of the pages of philosophy and fiction: in 1894, the wealthy astronomer Percival Lowell built...
...NASA'S GRAND SLAM The Hubble Space Telescope produced astonishing pictures of cosmic clouds, stellar nurseries and galactic collisions. The space shuttle executed a flawless linkup with the Russian space station Mir--twice. And a probe from the intrepid spacecraft Galileo became the first man-made object to plunge through the upper atmosphere of the planet Jupiter...
PLANET OF THE YEAR: Jupiter, probed by Galileo. Runner-up: GL229B, superplanet/ proto-star eyed by Hubble telescope...
...SOLUTION WAS TO supplement the rocket's power with three "gravity assists," first from Venus, which Galileo skimmed around in a "crack-the-whip" maneuver that boosted its velocity and flung it back toward Earth, and then from Earth itself, which it swooped by twice, passing less than 200 miles from the ground before finally picking up sufficient speed to make it all the way to Jupiter...
Along the way, however, Galileo suffered a serious setback. In 1991, when J.P.L. controllers attempted to deploy the spacecraft's main, 16-ft.-wide, umbrella-like antenna--which had been tucked away during the Venus encounter to protect it from solar radiation--three of the antenna's 18 ribs got stuck. Despite more than 13 months of ingenious and increasingly desperate measures to shake these ribs loose, the antenna, which had been capable of transmitting 134,400 digital bits per second (or a complete image in about a minute), remains unusable...