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Goodbye, Galileo
deglr6328 writes "On the 21st of this month the Galileo Space Probe, which has been orbiting Jupiter for nearly eight years, will plummet fatefully into the crushing pressures and searing heat of that planet's interior. The spacecraft's 14 year journey has brought the discovery of, among other things, the first moon orbiting an asteroid, the first remote detection of life on earth when Carl Sagan used data from an onboard infrared spectrometer to observe the spectral signature of Oxygen in our atmosphere, it has caught snowflakes of Sulfur Dioxide as it flew through the plume of an erupting volcano on Io, snapped pictures of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 as it smashed into Jupiter's atmosphere and most importantly, provided proof a >60 Km deep ocean on Europa with hints of oceans on Callisto and Ganymede(listen to Ganymede's eerie sounding plasma wind). And all this with scarcely more computing power than a late '70s video game and a maximum data transfer rate of ~120 bits/s over a distance of more than 600 million Km. In a mission spanning three decades, the Galileo space probe has answered many of humanity's questions about space and presented us with the knowledge to ask many more which will be answered by the next generation of Jovian explorer. Goodnight Galileo."
Why is a person modded down when they post true statements? Yes, I did post this exact comment in reply to another comment also modded down.
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Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
I'm glad they decided to destroy this, unlike some of our other probes. We all know what happened when V'Ger came back, who knows what Galileo could have done.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
haha :)! dude, you better watch out, I like guys!
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
60 km. Well, the 4 loop 1-miler on your race course in track and field is always called the "1600 m dash", so 1.6 km = 1 mile. Therefore, 6.4 km = 4 miles, so 64 km = 40 miles. 60 km is 1/16 less than 64, and 1/16=.0625, so multiply that by 10 (.625) and 4 (2.5), and we get that 60 km = 37.5 miles. Easy, when you think about it.
That general method is actually quite useful in general. I've used it to convert liters to gallons (well, a pint's a pound, the world around, g = 32.2 ft/sec, 1 in = 2.54 cm, and water is 1.99 sl/ft^3), and other interesting calculations.
Thing is, though, it's necessary to practice doing these things in your head.
Otherwise, you won't be a geek.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
why have you added me to your foes?
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Then the Federal Government should keep its fucking nose out of education affairs!
Amen, brother.
Liberty in our Lifetime