Scientists at the Ames Research Center say they are excited about the arrival next week on Jupiter of a probe that may uncover secrets about the formation of the solar system.
Ames principal investigator Alvin Seiff said at a news briefing at the NASA facility that Earth is a very atypical planet.
"Visiting another planet, if it doesn't do anything else, it broadens your perspective," Seiff said, noting that interplanetary travel has become a popular them in fiction. "We're going to another world, only this is the real thing."
The scientists said that from their experience with previous space missions they can't say what they expect to learn when the probe plummets through the atmosphere of the giant gas planet at a speed of 106,000 mph on Dec. 7.
"We know we're going to get big surprises," Young said.
Probe project manager Marcie Smith said Galileo's entry into the Jovian atmosphere, only the fifth NASA mission to the planet, is the most challenging. If the spacecraft trajectory had been too high, the probe would have skipped uselessly off the atmosphere into space; if it had been too low, it would have burned up in the heat of atmospheric friction.
Even so, Smith said, a quarter of the mass of the probe will be consumed by the blazing heat of its entry, where it will create temperatures in the atmosphere just ahead of it twice as hot as the surface of the sun.
Scientists said that during the 75 minutes Galileo is expected to survive after its small dacron parachute opens to brake its descent, they hope to gather information about the planetary atmosphere's composition, temperature, pressure, clouds and intense lighting.
Young said the fate of the 746-pound probe will be to become part of the planet it was sent to explore, as first its aluminum and then its titanium melt and then vaporize somewhere deep beneath Jupiter's violently swirling ammonia and water clouds.
This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, Wed., December 6, 1995.
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