Word: cometted
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...WORD KOHOUTEK, AND MOST astronomers wince. Back in 1973 there were predictions that the comet of that name might be the brightest of the century. It turned out to be a total dud. Halley's comet was just as heavily overhyped 12 years later; that time around, at least, history's most celebrated comet was dim and unimpressive...
...Mars Pathfinder, scheduled for launch next December, which will land on the Red Planet and send a robot rover off to explore. Then comes Lunar Prospector in 1997, designed to chart the mineral composition of Earth's nearest neighbor, and after that a mission to bring a chunk of comet back to Earth, slated for 1999. Each is supposed to cost a few hundred million dollars at most, and thanks to NEAR that goal, considered highly improbable when it was first proposed five years ago, doesn't seem so absurd. "We've now proved we can get it built...
...backside of the moon. Passing twice through the asteroid belt, it snapped the first closeup images of the asteroid Gaspra and discovered the first asteroidal moon, a tiny clump (later named Dactyl) orbiting the asteroid Ida. Then in July 1994 it shot pictures of the fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 plunging into Jupiter, capturing images of the far-side impacts not visible from Earth...
...thrown Big Bang theorists a curve by suggesting that some stars in the universe are older than the universe itself. At the core of one galaxy it has found a black hole as massive as 3 billion suns. It has made scientists front-row spectators at the collision of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 and the planet Jupiter. And it has begun to unravel the riddle of the brilliant beacons of cosmic light known as quasars. Go to any astronomy conference these days, and you'll find half the scientific papers are based on space-telescope observations. "The Hubble," declares University...
...downside is that these complex systems can easily become unstable given the slightest change in conditions. That, according to some experts, could explain why the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago. According to this notion, the popular theory that the cause was a comet crash is only half right: the comet did crash, but its effect was to destabilize dino behavior, rendering the creatures unable to compete with mammals, those hairy little animals with big ambitions. This is just the sort of behavioral disruption (induced by disease rather than a comet impact) that leads to a disintegration...