JUPITER IS SO...FAR

It was hard to fully accept the articles about the Galileo spacecraft in the papers this week. The diagram on the front of the New York Times yesterday, with its careful description of the stages of parachute fallout on the surface of Jupiter, was masterfully done, but was more reminiscent of a high-school science text than a miracle of modern technology.

Although we live in an age where cars can talk, cuisinarts can blend and the World Wide Web can bring you news from around the planet, the accomplishments of an inhuman space probe still seem a little hard to believe in--too much sci-fi and too little fact.

Take a statement from yesterday's Times article: "Traveling 106,000 miles per hour, the 746-pound capsule streaked into the fringes of the planet's mostly hydrogen atmosphere, the friction of its passage producing a fiery glow as bright as the sun." Isaac Asimov, eat your heart out. Wonder-twin powers, activate.

That's not at all intended to cast aspersion on the dedicated scientists at Caltech in sunny Pasadena, Calif. (the weather of said city being another science-fiction-like spectre from the vantage point of a New England winter). Malfunctioning antenna and tape deck aside, their probe has lasted six years in space and will, we hope, give us some spectacular pictures.

But when we get those pictures, what's to make us believe that they are actually of the red Jovian planet? How are we to know that the brilliant scientists on the West Coast aren't playing a huge practical joke upon us? If they're smart enough to launch satellites into space, they're certainly smart enough to touch up a red spot here and an atmospheric ripple there.

What it comes down to, it seems, is faith, a giving oneself up to the excitement and the possibilities of space exploration. If it's all a hoax--if the pictures aren't real, if the stories are manufactured--it doesn't matter all that much anyway. After all, most of us will never go into space anyway. So let's succumb to disbelief and enjoy the show.