Word: galileo
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...shuttle Atlantis lifts off this week from its Cape Canaveral launch pad as planned, astronomers will let out a long-delayed cheer. At last the Galileo mission, which has languished for more than a decade because of technical debates and the Challenger explosion, will be getting under way. Astronauts on Atlantis will release the Galileo spacecraft, setting it on a six-year, 2.5 billion-mile journey to Jupiter. There the probe will take the first direct measurements of the planet's dense clouds and hurricane-like winds...
Programs like the Galileo probe to Jupiter and the Hubble space telescope have been delayed more than three years since the Challenger explosion because NASA never planned on using conventional rockets to launch them...
Aristotle's view prevailed through the Middle Ages, was embraced by Christianity and went largely unquestioned until Galileo and other early 17th century sky watchers pointed the newly invented telescope at the sun and saw black spots on its surface. So much for solar purity. Despite clerical disapproval, the reality of sunspots was quickly accepted. Still, more than two centuries passed before Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, a German apothecary and amateur astronomer, discovered the strange, cyclic behavior of the solar blemishes...
...early October a 40-day window will open for the shuttle launch of Galileo, a craft that will head toward the sun, swing around Venus, and then use the earth's gravity to sling itself out to Jupiter. When it arrives in late 1995, Galileo will drop a probe into the seething maelstrom of the giant planet's atmosphere. Then Galileo will rove through the Jovian system to explore its moons...
...space agency has learned not to raise hopes too high. Galileo, Magellan and the Hubble telescope were scheduled to be launched in 1986, which NASA had confidently proclaimed to be the Year of Space Science. That "year" ended in flames on Jan. 28 with the death of Challenger...