Sep 16 1998
From The Space Library
NASA regained control over SOHO and, after successfully thawing the craft's fuel, determined that its rocket thrusters were useable. NASA spokesperson William A. Steigerwald of Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) explained that flight controllers would check each individual system and instrument next, and would then reestablish full automatic gyroscopic control.
Scientists studying images taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft announced, in a joint teleconference with Cornell University and NASA's JPL, that Jupiter's rings appeared to consist of dust, created in the course of millions of years, as asteroids and comets crashed into the four small moons nearest the planet's surface-Metis, Adrastea, Amalthea, and Thebe. The images, captured during several hours in November 1996, when Galileo was able to observe the rings lit up by the Sun, had provided "unprecedented details of the tiny dust particles." Furthermore, scientists observed that, in the images, "the three rings stopped abruptly at different moons." Images from a second flyby in September 1997 had confirmed that "the depths of the three rings matched the depths of the moons' orbits," and that material in the rings "matched the dark red dust on the moons' surface." The scientists said that more moons than rings exist, because some of the moons supply dust to more than one ring.
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