Word: probe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...million probe unearthed numerous allegations, many of which have been discarded. The committee found that Wright's heavy-handed intervention with federal officials on behalf of failing Texas savings and loan associations was no more than what other Texas Congressmen were doing. His intercession with Government officials and Egypt's Anwar Sadat to help a Texas oil-and-gas company was also found to be all in a day's work for the average member...
...next liftoff should come in April, when the shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to send a craft called Magellan on its way to Venus. The space probe will begin orbiting the planet next year, using radar to map its cloud-hidden surface. The best maps now in existence, compiled by Soviet spacecraft, show features as small as a quarter-mile across, but Magellan is expected to do about ten times as well...
...early October a 40-day window will open for the shuttle launch of Galileo, a craft that will head toward the sun, swing around Venus, and then use the earth's gravity to sling itself out to Jupiter. When it arrives in late 1995, Galileo will drop a probe into the seething maelstrom of the giant planet's atmosphere. Then Galileo will rove through the Jovian system to explore its moons...
Another burst of information should come in August, when Voyager 2 makes the last swing on its grand tour of the outer planets. Launched in 1977, the probe has already accumulated scientific data and taken spectacular pictures at Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. Next stop: Neptune. From earth, Neptune appears as a tiny, fuzzy green ball of light, and its major moon, Triton, as an orange dot. Voyager will provide the first closeup view of both. Triton is especially tantalizing, since it is believed to have its own thin atmosphere of methane, and may be partly covered by oceans of liquid...
...this year proceeds as planned, NASA intends to keep up the momentum. In 1990 shuttles are scheduled to launch the ROSAT X-ray telescope, the Gamma Ray Observatory and Ulysses, the first probe to study the sun's polar regions. But some experts worry about relying too heavily on the shuttle. "I certainly hope that these missions will go off as planned," says James Van Allen, the University of Iowa physicist who discovered the Van Allen radiation belts that ring the earth. "But the shuttle is not out of the woods yet. After Challenger, NASA should have made a decision...