Spacecraft such as the Hubbell telescope and the Galileo space probe are remote-sensing antennae for the body of the Net. These digitally connected feelers transmit laser-guided streams of digital images, letting us see into the blackness surrounding us - through our desktop monitors.
Clementine I, a military space probe launched last January, is the latest addition to the Net's array of whiskers. It was built by the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (you probably remember it under its former title, the money-sucking SDI).
Just why is the Pentagon taking pictures of outer space? Are Defense drones looking for little green men to fight now that the commies have called it quits? No, the Clementine project is a mission to test tracking and targeting hardware using celestial bodies like asteroids, instead of more expensive manmade targets. But scientists are going to accumulate a wealth of astronomical data in the process of the military exercise.
Like the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization's revolutionary Delta Clipper ("Will the Delta Clipper Turn Deep Space Into Cyberspace," WIRED 2.02, page 68), Clementine was built fast and cheap using the latest technology. Launched just one day late, Clementine was developed on a remarkably short two-year schedule for US$75 million.
Measuring six feet in length, the 1,000-pound Clementine is making a complete map of the moon (the first in twenty years), and will then loop around Earth and shoot out 5.3 million miles for a fly-by of the asteroid Geographos. You can get Clementine's pictures from clementine.s1.gov.
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