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JPL : PROBING OUTER SPACE

Mashruk Zahid
PACE, the final frontier *
with these words begin another episode of the hit TV series and movie "Star Trek". But these words are not just mete fiction. The statement is a fact. It is Impossible to comprehend the limitlessness of space. It goes beyond the beyond. And Man cannot be held captive to just a small sector of it He attempts to expand his horizons and by doing so has already conquered the Moon, which has been a truly remarkable achievement.
All this has been made possible thanks to rockets and spacecrafts. These Ingenious master-pieces created by Man hflve become his tools In the conquest of space. To send a man to the moon requires extensive amount of data most of which has been collected by the unmanned space probes designed by the Jet Propulsion Lab. The JPL. situated on the hilly locale of Pasadena. California, pioneers In the field of rocketry and sophisticated unmanned space craft At first glance. JPL may not seem fitting to its image No spacecraft are ever launched there, and. other than data collection, it has helped the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) with very little In Its shuttle programmes. But in Its own humble way JPL is slowly changing our outlook on our galaxy.
The Jet Propulsion Lab was started tn 1936 as a small research project in rocketry. It was run by a group of students and scientists from the California Institute of
Technology, which is also a division of the National
nearest neighbour Venus to have a surface temperature of over 400 degrees Celsius and an atmosphere comprising mainly of sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. In 1964 cameras aboard JPL's Ranger 7 transmitted pictures of the moon, close — ups with 2000 times the resolution of the best Earth — based telescopes Soon after. Mariner 4 provided Images of the desert planet Mars locked tn an Ice Age. Almost a decade later, instru
ments aboard the Viking soft — landers analyzed samples of
Reaching Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn In 1980, the Voyagers made many major discoveries.
They found unknown moons and the first active volcanoes outside Earth. Eight years after completing their original mission. the Voyagers continue to forge through space, transmitting Information that has Increased our knowledge of the planets a thousand — fold. Now. as Voyager, 1 approaches the edge pf the solar system.
Voyager 2. repregrammed by JPL navigators to fly past Uranus In 1986. is speeding onwards towards Neptune to be the first spacecraft ever to reach that planet.
Keeping track and maintaining control over such projects would definitely provide a problem. To overcome It, a system of antennas, receivers and transmitters known as the Deep Space Network, has been installed to keep in constant contact with JPL.'s space probes. Through the DSN. scientists can alter the Course of a spacecraft, direct instruments toward interesting phenomena, gather chemical and meteorological data or record images of space never before seen by man. DSN stations In California. Spain and Australia conduct radio experiments as well : as part of the Interna-tlonal Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Project, these stations are carrying out an all — sky survey of radio waves, hoping to stumble on some sign of distant civilization.
Cameras and transmitters aboard these space probes are the finest known. Images gathered by these space probes pass through special fitters which break them down into a sequence of numbers or codes representing colour variations and darkness. These are then formed back Into pictures at the DSN labs by what in known as Image processing. This process Is also used to diagnose cancer patients and bum victims, showing that modem technology is not just benefac tory to cosmology alone.