Word: missions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...doubt the scientific value of the Galileo flight. Nonetheless, a sharp controversy has dogged the mission. At issue is the space probe's power source: two radioisotope thermoelectric generators that are fueled by almost 50 lbs. of highly radioactive plutonium 238. Antinuclear groups, led by the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice and the Washington-based Christic Institute, have claimed that the generators are unsafe. Their view is shared by Richard Cuddihy, an analyst with the Inhalation Toxicology Research Center in Albuquerque and the lone dissenter on the federal interagency panel that recommended a go-ahead for the Galileo program...
Space officials calculate that the chances of plutonium being released in an aborted mission are no greater than 1 in 1,428. Declares Dudley McConnell, nuclear safety manager for NASA: "You have a thousand times greater chance of dying on the ground from debris falling from an airplane crash than you do from the Galileo mission." Critics, though, remain unconvinced by such assurances. For them, the only real comfort will come when Galileo is gone from earth...
...Barrio is from Mission, Tex., where she was involved in competitive cheerleading...
...elected as representatives. These new council members now bear the burden of working together to convince the whole council to maintain the political role it has taken on in recent years--and to expand that role by building a convincing and progressive student position on what the University's mission really should...