Robert’s Robots: Courting Disaster
The 11th episode of the British comedy series Robert’s Robots airs on ITV licensee Thames Television, starring John Clive (A Clockwork Orange, Yellow Submarine) as eccentric inventor Robert Sommerby and Nigel Pegram as one of his robot creations.
Pioneer 11 visits Jupiter
NASA’s Pioneer 11 space probe passes close to Jupiter, barely 27,000 miles above the giant planet’s cloudtops, again encountering radiation capable of frying spacecraft electronics. Pioneer 11 captures the first images of Jupiter’s polar cloud structure and pulls off a daring gravity assist maneuver: the planet’s gravity flings Pioneer 11 up and over the north polar region and across the solar system for a 1979 rendezvous with Saturn, the first spacecraft to visit that planet.