Word: giotto
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...Soviet Union's Vega 1 and Vega 2 will analyze the abundant dust motes and charged gases that envelop the comet's nucleus. Most remarkable of all, data and pictures from the Vega twins will enable European scientists to chart Halley's course precisely enough to allow their probe, Giotto, to come within about 300 miles of the nucleus, snapping thousands of photographs as it swoops by. Says Kunio Hirao, a former top official at Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), "This kind of space-based collaboration by scientists all over the world could never have been...
...probes will attempt to reckon the position and orbit of Halley's nucleus with a precision impossible from ground-based observations and then beam the data back to the Soviet Union, which will in turn relay the information to European mission control in Darmstadt, West Germany, in time for Giotto's rendezvous on March 13. Precision is of the essence: zeroing in on a nucleus that scientists estimate measures only two to six miles in diameter and is traveling some 154,000 m.p.h. is no mean feat. Without help from Vega 1 and 2, Giotto could be as much...
...Indeed, Giotto's mission is by far the most grueling of the five. Looking rather like an oil drum with an upended beach umbrella stuck on top, the 5-ft. by 6-ft. probe was launched from Kourou, French Guiana, last July; as of last week it was 21 million miles from earth and nearly three times as far from Halley's. The little ship and everything on it are built for survival, and with good reason. The dust particles around the nucleus are expected to strike Giotto with such great velocity that a speck weighing a tenth...
Should the probe weather its many assaults, the rewards will be splendid. During its four-hour encounter, Giotto will explore the material streaming from the nearby nucleus with a total of ten experiments. As the craft revolves on its axis, a solid-state optical camera extending from the bottom rim like a bent stovepipe will snap a photograph once every four seconds. The pictures will be instantly transmitted to earth and shown live on television. Mass spectrometers will analyze the composition of the dust from the nucleus, and other instruments will examine the properties of the ions in detail...
...always sincere, and there is a kind of forcible vulgarity, as American as a meatball hero, that takes itself for genius; Jacqueline Susann died believing she was the peer of Charles Dickens. "My peers," Schnabel told the New York Times last winter, "are the artists who speak to me: Giotto, Duccio, Van Gogh." Doubtless this list will change if he tries a ceiling, but Schnabel has never learned to draw; in graphic terms, his art has barely got beyond the lumpy pastiches of Max Beckmann and Richard Lindner he did as a student in Houston. The dull, uninflected megalomania...