chris_gerrib: (Default)
chris_gerrib ([personal profile] chris_gerrib) wrote2018-08-28 09:54 am
Entry tags:

Tuesday Trivia - 243 Ida edition

A preview of the trivia section for this week's newsletter of the Darien Rotary Club:

On this date in 1993, NASA’s Galileo unmanned probe, on its way to Jupiter for a multi-year mission, flew by the asteroid 243 Ida. During the fly-by, the probe discovered that the asteroid had a natural moon. The moon was named Dactyl and is believed to be either a fragment of Ida or another piece of the same object from which Ida was created. Although the Galileo spacecraft has had a massively-successful mission, it suffered from a major flaw with its radio antenna, making data downloads to Earth very slow. As a result, the images with Ida’s moon were not studied by NASA until February 1994.
nodrog: Rake Dog from Vintage Ad (Default)

[personal profile] nodrog 2018-08-29 04:19 am (UTC)(link)


You don't wanna know what caused that “major flaw” in Galileo's antenna.  In a word:  Congress.