Art Bell picked up on this; especially the terminology "Beacon". If it's ET, then why are we sending Galileo to crash into Jupiter? I've always opposed this and never believed that it would really surely crash into a possibly habitable moon otherwise, & I'm very experienced in orbital mechanics. If we have germs on Galileo they must be dead by now in that radiation environment unless they are the kind that grow like mold and stink up the ISS.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2...zle.htm?friend

Interesting. Jupiter emitting x-rays. but to answer your question, I believe we are crashing Galileo into Jupiter as we have squuezed as much information from the probe as possible and crashing Galileo might be able to give us a little bit more data in its last glimpses before the gravitational field destroys it. More than likely, since its fuel is almost completely gone, the gravitational pull of Jupiter and its moons might cause it to crash anyway and Nasa is doing a controlled final descent. I highly doubt it is ET in origin but it does show that we really are still just scraping the cusp of the knowledge space has to offer us. Perhaps the next probe out that way will be equipped to check that out.

After Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter, the Weekly World News ran a healdine that read, "Distress call received from Jupiter hours before impact!"

So I guess all life on Jupiter perished in a natural catastrophe [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Rob

I liked the picture they had of the impact. Or maybe it was on some other magazine. The comet was about 1/3 the diameter of Jupiter.

I remeber the picture. I thought to myself, bye-bye Jupiter. But when it hit, I think all the ice melted on entry and there wasn't anything left to cause any damage. I hope we're that lucky if we get hit. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

You guys are all reading WWN for comet info? What's the deal with that? Here's a more credible source about Shoemaker-Levy The comet was not a third as big as Jupiter, but the scars were bigger than the Earth. Jupiter doesn't have much of a surface, as we normally think of one. The gas giants are pretty much gas. The average density of Saturn is less than water.

Hey, I put a smiley there...I thought the WWN headline was inspired lunacy...if I were that creative, I would be rich!

I have met David Levy and talked to him about the comet. He still loves sharing the stories of watching the images of Jupiter after the fragments crashed into it.

Unfortunately, I was on a trip to NYC and didn't have access to my telescopes when it was crashing...I would have loved to have watched it!

Rob