Word: probe
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...Carey's loveliest songs to date, with her voice humming and hovering above a tinkling, childlike melody: "And your love/ breaks away the clouds surrounding me." Such moments are too rare on this release. One gets the sense that Carey is squandering her chance at greatness, a malfunctioning probe missing her target planet, spinning into pop oblivion...
...NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California, that had been working day and night for nearly a week to rouse the mysteriously silent spacecraft. Now the only hope left was in the hands of Observer: its onboard computers had been programmed to phone home if the probe hadn't heard from Earth for five days, triggering an electronic blip that would appear on Dean's screen. Scientists could then lock on to the signal and restore communications. But the time came -- and went. And the screen remained empty...
...reason Mars Observer had gone abruptly off the air the previous Saturday evening may never be known, although engineers suspect faulty transistors in the clocks that govern all the probe's electronics. And the ship's whereabouts are anybody's guess. It could be in orbit around the Red Planet or shooting off into interplanetary space. It could have blown up. A fringe group even swears that NASA destroyed Observer to hide the existence of a Martian civilization...
...with it is another chunk of NASA's eroding reputation for technological brilliance. This year alone, the agency has slipped its deadlines on 13 space- shuttle launches, forcing it to cut flights from the schedule. It failed, after multiple attempts, to free the stuck main antenna on the Galileo probe to Jupiter. And on the same day controllers lost touch with Mars Observer, the space agency also lost contact with a newly launched, $67 million weather satellite...
...persuade it to fund the program with huge sums -- $31 billion to date. Clearly stung, Defense Secretary Les Aspin, a former Congressman, ordered an internal investigation at the Pentagon. Said he: "Any allegation that the Congress has been misled raises serious questions." Said Senator David Pryor, whose long-standing probe of SDI seems to have triggered the revelations: "It could totally discredit the testing process and the credibility of the Pentagon...