Universe Today - January 18, 2002

One of the world's most powerful telescopes has begun operations on the summit of a remote Chilean mountain. The Gemini South, which is an identical twin to the Gemini North in Hawaii uses an 8-metre mirror to gather images with 10x the power of the Hubble Space Telescope. This new Gemini observatory also uses an adaptive optics system to compensate for the distortions of the Earth's atmosphere to produce images as sharp as if they were taken from space.

The Galileo spacecraft ran into problems on Thursday just as controllers were preparing it to make a flyby of Io, Jupiter's closest moon. The spacecraft entered "safe mode" only 28 minutes before its closest approach to Io, and flew past without taking any more pictures. It's believed that intense radiation from Jupiter shut the probe down. Even with the temporary shut down, the flyby fulfilled its main objective: to slingshot the spacecraft into an orbit that will slam it into Jupiter in 2003.