Word: spacecrafts
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...computer industry. It was designed to have a useful life of three years, at most. Yet today, after a quarter-century, when Fischer has disappeared from the chess scene and the IBM 360 is merely a nostalgia item on display at Boston's Computer Museum, the doughty little spacecraft Pioneer 10 is still plugging along...
Cruising through the cosmos at 27,700 m.p.h., the Energizer bunny of NASA spacecraft is measuring cosmic rays and solar emissions, probing for the outer boundary of the solar system and even abetting the efforts of scientists pursuing SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. When Pioneer was launched in March 1972, its primary assignment, ordained by NASA, was to reach the environment of Jupiter. At the time, says physicist James Van Allen, the discoverer of Earth's radiation belt and a principal contributor to Pioneer's achievements, "this objective was regarded as a bold one." While unmanned U.S. and Soviet...
Then, assisted by a powerful boost from Jovian gravity, the spacecraft hurtled toward deep space. Not far beyond Jupiter, scientists had expected Pioneer to find the boundary of the heliosphere, beyond which the solar wind (charged particles emitted from the sun) can no longer be detected. Yet as distant as Pioneer is today, it is still being wafted by solar breezes, and scientists now believe the elusive boundary could lie as far as 10 billion miles from the sun, and perhaps farther...
Pioneer will eventually cross that boundary but will be unable to convey the news to Earth. Unlike spacecraft operating closer to the sun, it cannot rely on solar panels to generate power. Instead it is equipped with a thermocouple-like generator heated by radiation from a clump of plutonium 238. Unfortunately, the radiation is also slowly degrading the generator, which is producing only two-thirds of its original output...
First, the Galileo spacecraft orbits Jupiter, surfs its moons, comes closer to Ganymede than New York City is to Washington and sends back pictures sharp enough to find a small building. (None found yet.) This, after an earlier sweep by the moon Europa brings back news that under Europa's cracked and shifting ice cover may lie huge oceans of water--exactly the kind of incubator we look for to find life...