Word: giotto
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...work for 80 years, long after the close-knit and weak little societies it represented had been incinerated by Hitler and Stalin. "All the little fences, the little cows and sheep, all the Jews, looked to me as original, as ingenuous and as eternal as the buildings in Giotto's frescoes," he reminisced...
...object to record close-up views of a comet's coma and nucleus, and send the images and other data back to earth.* It also served as the advance guard for four other craft -- the Soviet Vega 2, the Japanese Suisei and Sakigake, and the European Space Agency's Giotto -- that were to sweep by Halley's in the following week...
Vega 1 also served as a pathfinder for two other craft in the Halley's flotilla. By helping scientists determine the comet's precise path, it enabled them to make accurate last-minute corrections in the courses of Vega 2 and Giotto. The second Vega was to pass within 5,000 miles of the comet on March 9, supplementing Vega 1's findings. Giotto's mission four days later was to swoop to about 300 miles of the nucleus, shooting close-up pictures as it passed. Precision pathfinding was less important for the Japanese craft. Suisei, designed to study...
...week's end scientists were worried about Giotto's chances. As they continued to interpret Vega 1's data, they discovered that its passage through the dust jet had damaged 45% of the craft's solar panels. During Giotto's much closer encounter with the comet, the European probe was bound to pass through far thicker clouds of dust on what some scientists characterized as a "kamikaze mission...
...first of an international flotilla of spacecraft will take over Halley's vigil. The Soviet probe Vega 1 will fly through the coma, passing within 6,000 miles of the nucleus. It will be followed by another Soviet craft, two Japanese probes, and the European Space Agency's Giotto, which will make the most daring pass of all. On March 13, Giotto will swoop within about 300 miles of Halley's nucleus and--if it survives the encounter --transmit the first close-up pictures of a comet's nucleus ever seen...