Word: asteroids
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Saint Exupery tells the story of a little man who lives all alone on a distant asteroid, of the journey that he takes from his asteroid to the Sahara Desert, and of the adventures he has there and elsewhere on the earth. His book is laced with quaint illustrations (by Saint Exupery himself) of a coa constrictor swallowing an elephant, baobab trees devouring a planet, and ant hill sized volcanoes...
...every sci-fi fan knows, one of the great hazards of space travel between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter is the asteroid belt: a doughnut-shaped stretch of floating debris that could fatally pierce the thin metallic skin of a speeding spacecraft. Now, for the first time, a real ship is beginning to run this rocky gauntlet. Success will increase the possibility of future missions to Jupiter and the other outer planets (Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto...
Launched from Cape Kennedy last March, the instrument-packed Pioneer 10 is scheduled to make the first flyby of Jupiter late next year. But for the next seven months, NASA scientists will be watching to see whether their spaceship can pass unharmed through the 175 million-mile-wide asteroid belt. The greatest danger may not come from any of the 1,831 charted asteroids that range in diameter from one mile to 480 miles, but from untold numbers of tiny fragments, some of them no bigger than a grain of talcum powder. At typical asteroid speeds (30,000 m.p.h.), such...
Scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center figure that the odds of such a collision are no worse than one in ten. Says Project Scientist John Wolfe: "Pioneer should get through without any trouble at all." Still, the density of the asteroid belt, now estimated as one particle per 10 million sq. km., is one of the questions that scientists are now trying to answer, and they cannot really be sure. In fact, a surprise of the pre-belt journey is that Pioneer was hit by 56 tiny meteoroids, or about 50% more than expected. Fortunately, these impacts, detected...
Such data may help clear up the mystery of the asteroid belt itself. For a long time astronomers suspected that it was made up of the remnants of a small planet that was blown apart, perhaps in a collision with a comet. Now astronomers are leaning to the idea that the asteroid belt consists of primordial matter that failed to coalesce into a full-fledged planet. If so, that could make an asteroid an even more valuable prize than any moon rock-assuming some far-ranging space traveler could bring it home. It would be a piece of material largely...