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The esteemed Crank o' the Day for 2026 Sep 08:
Did NASA Accidentally "Nuke" Jupiter?
2003 Dec 15
... astronomy
. nuclear physics
...
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"NASA's decision to finally terminate Galileo via a fiery plunge into Jupiter, was designed in 2002 to prevent any possible biological contamination of this remarkable environment from a future random collision with the spacecraft, once its fuel was exhausted. ... When NASA announced its 'Galileo into Jupiter' option, among those to publish immediate, serious objections was an engineer named Jacco van der Worp. Van der Worp claimed that, plunging into Jupiter's deep and increasingly dense atmosphere, the on-board Galileo electrical power supply -- a set of 144 plutonium-238 fuel pellets, arrayed in two large canister devices called 'TGs' -- would ultimately 'implode'; that the plutonium Galileo carried would ultimately collapse in upon itself under the enormous pressures of Jupiter's overwhelming atmosphere -- Triggering a runaway nuclear explosion! Van der Worp further argued that this fission reaction might well initiate a much larger thermonuclear fusion reaction in the deuterium (heavy hydrogen) making up a significant percentage of Jupiter's atmosphere -- ultimately, igniting Jupiter as the solar system's second sun!"
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