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Galileo's Final Blaze of Glory
EccentricAnomaly writes: "CNN reports that the Galileo spacecraft is about to perform its last flyby of Io. Galileo will skim a mere 100 km above Io to enter a trajectory that crashes into Jupiter in 2003. This is to avoid the spacecraft running out of fuel and accidentally crashing into Europa which might contaminate it with any bacteria spores on Galileo. This is a real concern - Apollo 12 found bacteria on Surveyor 3 that survived two and a half years on the moon."
but I always am surprised when I hear these stories of how long bacteria can survive outside of normal conditions. 31 months on the moon, 4800 years in peruvian pyramids, 11000 years in a dead mastodon (extinct mammal sort of like an elephant), and (mabye) 300 million years in coal!
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
What I don't understand from this theory is how bacteria can survive the reentry pressure and especially heat that is generated! Or does the inside of a big enough asteroid stay cool? I wouldn't think so but does anybody have a definitive answer?
Actually, you don't need to worry about heat. The massive amount of heat generated by the shuttle reentry and other such things has to reasons:
1) The shuttle is moving very, very fast relative to the atmosphere
2) The shuttle has a large ablative surface area
Assuming an assload of spores hits the Earth, a lot of them will be burned up (wrong trajectory, etc), but plenty of them will survive and simple drift down.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
is if jupiters magnetic field created a wormhole to a few billion years ago, and we sent a probe through which had a small amount of bacteria in it. It then lands on earth, and over the next few billion years ends up evolving into Humans...... what a paradox. What came first? the human or the probe ;-). Oh dear... my heads starting to hurt.
(Ok Ok I know... but I've just finished watching the new Planet of the Apes movie)
More importantly, there are plans being drawn up to send probes to Europa to look for eveidence of life, as it's one of the most likely candidates in the solar system.
If there is any bacteria on the galileo probe, then crashing it on Europa risks contaminating any samples that we do take, thus giving false positives. Not cool given the amount of time, effort and money that will go into such a mission. (Don't even get me started on what a blow it would be for science...)
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
In 1919, my father and Roy Adams, were 10 years old. My grandmother gave my father a small lathe which he and Roy used to fabricate a small, air-powered, motor. The motor is amazing, especially given that it was designed and built by two 10 year olds.
Roy's parents were poor so he didn't get to go college. However, he was so self-evidently bright, it didn't matter. JPL eventually hired him and he ended his career as a project manager on the Galileo. My father always got a kick out of the fact that Roy, with his high school diploma, had a raft of rocket science Ph.D.'s reporting to him.
The little air-powered motor still works. It, like the Galileo, way outlived its intended design life. Rest In Peace Roy, you did good.
Which is why I'm kinda pissed-off about the report of the camera shutdown (from the CNN article -- "The mission budget does not cover any further pictures") after the Io flyby.
Does anyone know if CNN fscked up (perhaps by misinterpreting "we're shutting down the cameras until late 2002 because we're not flying near anything interesting for a while"), or if we've given up on imaging Amalthea altogether?
(Or, is there simply not enough time to send back both the data from the Amalthea approach and get Amalthea images before Jupiter impact, in which case the data takes priority. Or is the radiation field around Amalthea so intense that we couldn't get pictures even if we tried? Any space geeks know what's really going on?)
It wasn't Lt. Calley who said that, BTW. I see your .sig on Slashdot frequently and the inaccuracy bugs me.
... never mind that.
It was said by an Army officer in a famous TV interview, back in the days when villages were being rebuilt into strongpoints that supposedly would then defend themselves against Viet Cong infiltrators. This theory ignored the fact that the villagers mostly despised the current economic system and their obscenely corrupt government, and therefore welcomed the VC as prophets of change, but
The point of the statement was that the old village had to be destroyed and replaced with a new, fortified, Army-built strongpoint in order to save it from the VC. The officer (a Captain IIRC) didn't see the irony of the situation which his statement so succinctly summarized.
I don't remember Calley saying anything particularly memorable. "I was just following orders" was already a trite, worn-out phrase by then.