Word: planetful
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...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...
Although we live in an age where cars can talk, cuisinarts can blend and the World Wide Web can bring you news from around the planet, the accomplishments of an inhuman space probe still seem a little hard to believe in--too much sci-fi and too little fact...
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...
...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 Jupiter's extreme heat and pressure destroy...