Word: comets
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...funny thing happened on the way to Halley's comet last week. As an armada of Soviet, Japanese and European space probes hurtled through the cosmos toward their heralded meetings with the fabled comet next March, they were upstaged by a modest and almost archaic Ameri can spacecraft. The International Cometary Explorer whipped through the tail of an obscure apparition called Giacobini-Zinner, thereby becoming the first man-made object to encounter a comet...
...terrestrial gravity) 930,000 miles from the earth. Its mission: to study the effect of the solar wind on the earth's magnetic field. Yet even as ISEE-3 sniffed at solar breezes, its flight director, NASA Aerospace Engineer Robert Farquhar, was plotting to divert it somehow toward a comet. "The craft was custom-made to measure plasma waves," he explains, "and that's exactly what you find at the back of a comet...
...least some dinosaur species were not sensitive tropic dwellers but were able to survive through chilly and dark Arctic winters lasting from November to February. That theory tends to undermine the currently popular asteroid version of the apocalypse. According to that model, all dinosaurs perished when an asteroid or comet collided with the earth and tossed obscuring dust into the air, blocking sunlight and lowering ground temperatures. Clemens counters that dinosaurs living up north would hardly have noticed the difference, let alone be wiped out. Says he: "It doesn't matter if your long winter night is the result...
...point in their lives do they hurt garden vegetables or flowering plants, although their egg laying can damage young trees. They are bugs of such innocence and beauty and specialness that their appearance, one would think, would be regarded with interest and appreciation, like that of a comet or a rare bird...
Most experts agree with Harvard Astronomer Fred Whipple, who characterized comets as "dirty snowballs" consisting largely of ice and mineral-rich dust. Comets are thought to originate in the Oort cloud, a distant shell of icy debris believed to surround the solar system and extend out some 10 trillion miles from the sun. Passing stars sometimes dislodge snowballs from the cloud, which can sprout the classic luminous tails of gas and dust as they plunge toward the sun. Most comets whip around the sun and head back out of the solar system. Some, like Halley's, periodically return. But others...