Word: solarized
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DIED. CLAIR PATTERSON, 73, geochemist who in the early '50s established the age of the earth and the solar system as 4.6 billion years; of asthma; in Sea Ranch, California...
...many ways, Jupiter is like a miniature solar system," says Wesley Huntress, a NASA space science administrator. "The Galileo mission should uncover new clues about how the sun and the planets formed and how they continue to interact and evolve...
...year, 2.3 billion-mile odyssey, a 2 1/2-ton, instrument-crammed spacecraft named after the Italian astronomer will hurtle past two of those moons, Europa and Io, then swing into orbit around Jupiter. There, if all goes well, it will conduct the most thorough study ever of the solar system's largest planet and its swarm of moons (Jupiter is known to have at least...
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...
...some astronomers were dubious. "They considered the whole thing to be rather a Rube Goldberg creation," says Spitzer. On top of that, the list of tasks assigned to the astronauts who flew the repair mission--not just installing the new optics, but replacing an outdated camera, two wobbly solar-energy panels and three faulty gyroscopes, among other balky components--seemed too long. "I don't think anyone except the astronauts themselves thought they could complete the mission," says Bahcall...