Table of Contents

Random Walk

How We Hit That Sucker: The Story of Deep Impact
by William M. Owen Jr.
If a spacecraft heads east from Canaveral at 25,000 miles per hour and a cometheads south from Chicago... JPL's navigation team solves a story problem.

Picture This
by Douglas L. Smith
Los Angeles's newly reopened Griffith Observatory features the largest astronomical image ever made-a 152-foot wall of galaxies, rendered for the ages in porcelain enamel. But the journey from Palomar to porcelain was a long one.

Planetary Exploration in Extremis
by Peter J. Westwick
JPL's robot explorers are the pride of NASA, but the lab nearly got shut down in the budget-cutting early '80s. Here's the hair-raising story.

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