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TRANSITIONS

A reluctant farewell to an 18-year Ulysses space probe that keeps on keeping on

The sun will set Tuesday on Ulysses, a robotic sentry that spent more than 18 years exploring unseen reaches of the sun for NASA and the European Space Agency.

Ground controllers will communicate with the nuclear-powered probe for the final time Tuesday, ending a $1.4 billion mission that operated more than three times longer than expected.

"It's time to call it quits and wave a fond farewell," said Nigel Angold, ESA mission operations manager based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Ulysses is running on fumes, sending back less science data, and in danger of freezing to death, according to mission officials.

"I feel ambivalent," said Ed Smith, NASA project scientist at JPL. "It's been such a long time and it's always sad. You get quite devoted to the spacecraft and to the other members of the team."

NASA launched Ulysses aboard space shuttle Discovery in October 1990. Spinning and balancing like a top, the probe was boosted into the outer solar system by two upper stage rockets after deploying from Discovery.

Ulysses flew by Jupiter in 1992, using the giant planet's immense gravity to naturally propel it out of the solar system's ecliptic plane and into a polar orbit around the sun.

Now WaPo's Kurtz is proclaiming the death of print media

Is this it?

Is the product you are accustomed to holding in your hands a relic, soon to go the way of silent movies and manual typewriters?

I have been one of the industry's most fervent optimists, convinced that somehow, some way, newspapers would find a path to survival. But the past few weeks have shaken my belief, suggesting that what I find indispensable -- a daily compendium delivered to your doorstep -- might be left behind by history and public indifference.

The bleak future becomes clear when one paper after another whacks a third or more of its staff -- the Baltimore Sun is just the latest -- and the New York Times Co. threatens to shut down the Boston Globe before settling for painful cutbacks. This is not some temporary downturn; these jobs are gone forever.

Don't forget, Jack Kemp was also a quarterback

The obituaries for Jack Kemp, who died Saturday at age 73, have focused mostly on his career as a congressman, secretary of housing and urban development, and vice presidential candidate. But we should also take some time to remember Jack Kemp the quarterback. It's been so long since Kemp played — and he accomplished so much following his retirement in 1969 — that it has been largely forgotten just how good a football player Kemp was. Growing up in Los Angeles, Kemp was a good athlete and always knew he wanted to be a quarterback, but USC and UCLA didn't recruit him, so he decided to go to Division III Occidental instead. Kemp said years later that Occidental appealed to him because it ran a pro-style passing game that would prepare him for the NFL. That would turn out to be a wise career choice.




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