Word: cometted
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Blossoms of Flame. For much of the day, it looked as if the race would not even get properly started. As the red Mercury Comet pace car, driven by Benson Ford, turned into the pits, the field surged across the starting line at 100 m.p.h. in neat rows of three. Suddenly, the careful symmetry became a tangle of junk. In what looked like a "dodgem" game, the track was filled with spinning, fishtailing, crashing racers. Axles and suspensions snapped, tires sailed through the air, spurts of flame from spilled fuel blossomed on the asphalt. Driver Arnie Knepper climbed from...
That was half a century ago. Today the posted speed limit on the Kansas Turnpike is 80 m.p.h. "Comet," "Tempest" and "Fury" are synonyms for "car." Legislators in Washington are worried about too much speed and too little safety, and the U.S. Automobile is praised more faintly than the Teen-Ager and the Pill. All of which is likely to make this year's 500, coming when it does, the most controversial ever...
...Comet...
Shaped like a Comet. This enigmatic Russian reference to the terrestrial tail was the first apparent confirmation that the earth's magnetic field extends as far as the moon, 239,000 miles away. Earlier observations by U.S. satellites and space probes established that the magnetic field is shaped like a comet with a tail that stretches at least 120,000 miles into space. Now it seems that the electrons Luna encountered near the moon are temporarily confined there by the earth's magnetic tail in much the same way that the electrons and protons of the Van Allen...
Waving in the Breeze. The earth's magnetic field is formed into its comet-like shape by the solar wind, a stream of charged particles continuously emitted from the sun at velocities that vary from 670,000 m.p.h. to about 1,600,000 m.p.h. On the side of the earth that faces the sun, the wind compresses the field into a rounded shell that extends only about 40,000 miles into space. On the dark (or antisolar) side, the field is pushed into a tail that is hundreds of thousands of miles long and waves in the solar breeze...