Word: planeteers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...solar system has a glamour world, Jupiter--with its brilliant colors, vast size and fruit fly-like swarm of 16 moons--has always been it. The planet appeared more elegant still in 1979, when the Voyager space probes discovered that it is circled by a fine set of nested rings...
...collision or the raw material of an incipient moon that had never had the gravitational muscle to pull itself together. Last week they reached a different conclusion. New images returned by the Galileo spacecraft reveal that the fairy-dust bands are debris blasted into space when the planet's four innermost moons were struck by meteors...
...quartet of small satellites ought to have been elusive targets for incoming debris. Orbiting so close to Jupiter, however, they lay in the path of any projectiles drawn in by the planet's gravity. When a rock hits one of the moons, it releases dust that follows the moons like smokestack exhaust...
While such a bombardment process had been considered by scientists, it was accepted only after recent pictures were analyzed. They showed that the ring material indeed appears to flow from the rump end of the moons, and that the moons and rings orbit the planet at identical angles. "We have a definitive answer to the origin of this ring system," says Michael Belton, leader of the Galileo imaging team...
...provide pilots with oxygen masks and goggles to shield them from smoke in the cockpit. But thick smoke can also prevent pilots from seeing their instruments or the view through their windshields. That concern has moved scores of owners and operators of corporate jets, from Prudential Insurance to Planet Hollywood, to install a $9,915 Emergency Vision Assurance System, manufactured by VisionSafe Corp. in Kaneohe, Hawaii. The portable, 5-lb. units inflate to form smoke-free plastic "cocoons" around instrument panels and windshields. Pilots activate the systems--there are two in each cockpit--after donning oxygen masks and goggles. Says...