Word: astrophysicists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...years ago yesterday, a Harvard-educated astrophysicist addressed 50 students at the Science Center on the progress of the space shuttle program and the future of space exploration Today, he is orbiting the earth aboard the space shuttle Discovery...
DIED. Iosif Shklovskii, 68, maverick Soviet astrophysicist and radio astronomer who made basic discoveries about neutron stars, quasars and novas (exploding stars), and also led the Soviets' search for extraterrestrial intelligence; of undisclosed causes; in Moscow. In the mid-1960s he posited that some intense radio emissions came from advanced alien civilizations, but they proved to be from quasars. Shklovskii's 1966 collaborative book with U.S. Astronomer Carl Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe, is still considered the basic treatise on the prospects for life beyond earth...
When University of Illinois Astrophysicist Larry Smarr discovered that the computers on campus were too small to simulate the behavior of quasars, those mysterious and distant starlike objects, he began casting around for a machine that could do the job. But Smarr soon realized that most of the hundred or so supercomputers powerful enough to serve his needs were either in the hands of private industry or tied up doing work for the Department of Defense. He finally had to use an American-made Cray 1 at West Germany's Max Planck Institut. "The Germans were extremely gracious," he says...
...advent of the computer has changed all that. Led by Astrophysicist Jerry Nelson, a team at the University of California designed an unorthodox mirror that will not be a continuous concave surface, like Hale's, but 36 hexagonal pieces of specially shaped glass, each 6 ft. across and 3 in. thick; the segments will be fit together and will move in concert to act as one giant parabolic mirror. That harmony is possible only with the aid of a computer- controlled sensing and positioning system, which will realign the components 100 times a second by as little...
...experiments. Space scientists must normally restrict their research to the passive observation of the heavens. AMPTE was designed to turn space into an active laboratory. "Rather than wait for chance events to happen, we decided to go out there and simulate natural conditions," says Mario Acuña, an astrophysicist with NASA'S Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt...