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Artist's impression of Galileo's arrival at Jupiter

The Galileo project was an American robotic space program that studied Jupiter and its moons (including Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto), as well as several other Solar System bodies. Named after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, the Galileo spacecraft consisted of an orbiter and an atmospheric entry probe. It was launched in 1989 by the Space Shuttle Atlantis on the STS-34 mission. Despite suffering major antenna problems, Galileo achieved the first asteroid flyby (of 951 Gaspra), discovered the first asteroid moon (Dactyl, around 243 Ida), and observed Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9's collision with Jupiter. After gravity-assisted flybys of Venus and Earth, Galileo became the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter. It then launched the first probe to directly measure Jupiter's atmosphere. In 2003, the mission was terminated by sending the orbiter into Jupiter's atmosphere to eliminate the possibility of contaminating the Jovian moons with terrestrial bacteria. (Full article...)

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On this day...

October 18: Alaska Day (1867)

Bob Beamon

1565 – The first recorded naval battle between Europeans and the Japanese occurred when a flotilla of samurai attacked two Portuguese trade vessels at the Battle of Fukuda Bay in Nagasaki.
1748 – The War of the Austrian Succession ended with the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.
1873 – Renton defeated Kilmarnock 2–0 in the opening match of the inaugural Scottish Cup.
1968 – At the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, American athlete Bob Beamon (pictured) achieved a distance of 8.90 m (29.2 ft) in the long jump event, setting a world record that stood for 23 years.

John FitzWalter, 2nd Baron FitzWalter (d. 1361)
Mehmet Esat Bülkat (b. 1862)
Maria Antonescu (d. 1964)
Bess Truman (d. 1982)

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In the news

Daron Acemoglu

Yahya Sinwar, the acting leader of Hamas, is killed in a firefight with Israeli forces in Gaza.
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences is awarded to Daron Acemoglu (pictured), Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson for their comparative studies of prosperity between nations.
The Europa Clipper spacecraft is launched to investigate Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter.
The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to the Japanese atomic bomb survivors group Nihon Hidankyo.

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From Wikipedia's newest articles:

...that the Roman de Fergus is the earliest piece of non-Celtic vernacular literature to have survived from Scotland?
...that the Philharmonia Hungarica made the first complete recording of Haydn's symphonies, was an orchestra founded by Hungarian exiles and funded by the West German government during the Cold War?
...that the dachas of the Russian poets Boris Pasternak, Korney Chukovsky, and Bulat Okudzhava in the village of Peredelkino near Moscow are open to the public as memorial houses?
...that an aerosani is a type of air-powered, armoured snowmobile, which was used for transport, reconnaissance, and raiding by the Red Army in the Winter War and the Second World War?
...that a push–pull converter is a type of DC-to-DC converter that uses a transformer to step the voltage of a DC power supply?
...that the Chicana artist Yolanda Lopez became famous with the painting "Virgen de Guadalupe", which represents Lopez's personal investigation into Virgen de Guadalupe's status in Mexican society?

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