Word: joviane
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Then, assisted by a powerful boost from Jovian gravity, the spacecraft hurtled toward deep space. Not far beyond Jupiter, scientists had expected Pioneer to find the boundary of the heliosphere, beyond which the solar wind (charged particles emitted from the sun) can no longer be detected. Yet as distant as Pioneer is today, it is still being wafted by solar breezes, and scientists now believe the elusive boundary could lie as far as 10 billion miles from the sun, and perhaps farther...
...Galileo goes into orbit, a probe that it will have released 147 days earlier will plunge into the upper Jovian atmosphere at 106,000 m.p.h., its heat shield glowing. Two minutes later, after friction has slowed its descent, the probe will deploy a parachute at around 400 m.p.h. and drift downward, sniffing at gases, measuring temperatures and pressures, observing cloud structures and lightning and transmitting data back to its mother ship. Finally, about an hour into its descent, the probe will be vaporized by the steadily increasing temperatures it encounters below the dense clouds. Its fate, says a NASA official...
After storing the probe's transmitted data in its tape recorder, Galileo will begin its tour of the Jovian system. In a route that will take it into 11 far-ranging orbits during the next 23 months, it will swoop as close as 160 miles above three of Jupiter's four major moons, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede, flying by each of them several times. On these passes--hundreds of times closer than those achieved by Voyagers 1 and 2 in 1979--it will shoot pictures and, with remote sensing instruments, analyze the chemical composition of the moons. In the course...
...when we get those pictures, what's to make us believe that they are actually of the red Jovian planet? How are we to know that the brilliant scientists on the West Coast aren't playing a huge practical joke upon us? If they're smart enough to launch satellites into space, they're certainly smart enough to touch up a red spot here and an atmospheric ripple there...
...Jupiter." Also Thursday, a smaller probe released from Galileo 147 days earlier will enter Jupiter's atmosphere. "There won't be any dramatic pictures, just a data stream," notes Jaroff, "but this will help clear up a lot of speculation about the composition of the Jovian atmosphere. Scientists have been able to make a lot of inferences about the planet, but this would be the first time they've been able to sample the atmosphere. They expect to find a high water content, and some lightning, at the higher levels in the hour before the probe descends so far that...