Word: spacecrafts
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...NASA'S GRAND SLAM The Hubble Space Telescope produced astonishing pictures of cosmic clouds, stellar nurseries and galactic collisions. The space shuttle executed a flawless linkup with the Russian space station Mir--twice. And a probe from the intrepid spacecraft Galileo became the first man-made object to plunge through the upper atmosphere of the planet Jupiter...
...NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (J.P.L.) in Pasadena, California, where the Galileo probe was largely designed and built, the moment of highest drama during the Dec. 7 Jupiter encounter will occur at 3:04 p.m. (P.S.T.). At that instant, a signal that will have been sent from the spacecraft 52 minutes earlier will arrive at J.P.L., having traveled 600 million miles at the speed of light. "A positive signal means the probe has survived the most difficult entry ever and is transmitting to Galileo," explains William O'Neil, the Galileo project manager. "That pretty much says...
...with remote sensing instruments, analyze the chemical composition of the moons. In the course of its many orbits, Galileo will also investigate Jupiter's fourth major moon, the volcanically active Io, but only at a safe distance; the moon lies within an intense radiation belt that could endanger the spacecraft's electronics systems...
Forced into a longer journey, the spacecraft made good use of its time. It shot pictures, calibrated its instruments, conducted scientific observations of Venus and Earth during its flybys and, among other achievements, confirmed the existence of a huge impact crater on the backside of the moon. Passing twice through the asteroid belt, it snapped the first closeup images of the asteroid Gaspra and discovered the first asteroidal moon, a tiny clump (later named Dactyl) orbiting the asteroid Ida. Then in July 1994 it shot pictures of the fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 plunging into Jupiter, capturing images...
Along the way, however, Galileo suffered a serious setback. In 1991, when J.P.L. controllers attempted to deploy the spacecraft's main, 16-ft.-wide, umbrella-like antenna--which had been tucked away during the Venus encounter to protect it from solar radiation--three of the antenna's 18 ribs got stuck. Despite more than 13 months of ingenious and increasingly desperate measures to shake these ribs loose, the antenna, which had been capable of transmitting 134,400 digital bits per second (or a complete image in about a minute), remains unusable...