Word: planeteers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mall, I gnash my teeth and think, Well, I have just lived too long and become a moss-backed old grump. But by jingo, it ain't true! Your Hubble space photos have put the wonderment back into my life! What's a little more concrete on an obscure planet circling a minor star compared to the crushing and splendiferous grandeur of all that's going on out there? WALTER MITCHELL JR. Dunwoody, Georgia...
...STARRY NIGHT IN 1610, IN THE city of Padua, Italy, Galileo Galilei pointed his newly handmade telescope skyward, stared into the eyepiece and gasped in excitement. Through the lenses of the world's first astronomical telescope, four white spots were clearly visible floating near a brightly shining planet. Galileo had discovered Jupiter's four major moons, the first (except for Earth's own moon) ever seen around a planet...
...billion-mile odyssey, a 2 1/2-ton, instrument-crammed spacecraft named after the Italian astronomer will hurtle past two of those moons, Europa and Io, then swing into orbit around Jupiter. There, if all goes well, it will conduct the most thorough study ever of the solar system's largest planet and its swarm of moons (Jupiter is known to have at least...
Take a statement from yesterday's Times article: "Traveling 106,000 miles per hour, the 746-pound capsule streaked into the fringes of the planet's mostly hydrogen atmosphere, the friction of its passage producing a fiery glow as bright as the sun." Isaac Asimov, eat your heart out. Wonder-twin powers, activate...
...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...