Word: cometted
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...lonely path, the distant star had grown bigger and brighter in the blackness of space. Now the icy wayfarer was picking up speed, and the star had become a shining yellow sphere, its intense light illuminating the planets circling it. Basking in the rays of the star, the approaching comet warmed, giving off vapors that formed a growing cloud around it. And in the brightening light, the cloud began to glow...
...inhabitants of earth, the third closest planet to the star, the long- awaited spectacle had begun. After a 75-year sojourn through the solar system, Halley's (rhymes with valley's) comet had again swung into view, but just barely. At Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson one night last month, several large telescopes tracked the approaching comet, projecting images that flickered across television monitors. But like countless amateur stargazers around the world, the astronomers wanted to see the cosmic celebrity with their own eyes. Huddled in the chill mountain air outside an observatory dome, necks craned, binoculars raised, they...
...there it was. The sight, however, was decidedly unspectacular. Because it was still too far from the sun to sport a visible tail, and 58 million miles away from earth, the comet looked like little more than a smudged and dusty fingerprint. Or, as Hyron Spinrad, a cosmologist from the University of California, Berkeley, declared, "It's a wimp." Still, everyone was delighted. For the skywatchers, the appearance of Halley's was a once-in-a- lifetime event, and they viewed it as a sort of psychological and even spiritual landmark. Said Astronomer Susan Wyckoff of Arizona State University...
...closest approach to earth, it will be greeted by five diminutive, instrument-crammed space probes, two launched by Japan, two by the Soviet Union and one by the eleven nations of the European Space Agency (ESA). The close encounters were set for March because that is when the comet passes through earth's orbital plane, the same level in which the spacecraft travel. Over several whirligig days, the flotilla will scrutinize the comet in exhaustive detail, from the fuzzy gaseous cloud that surrounds its icy nucleus to the two tails that by then will be streaming for millions of miles...
...million payload named Astro-1 that includes three ultraviolet telescopes and two wide-angle cameras. For much of the mission, the instruments will be studying such exotica as quasars, black holes and globular clusters, but for a while during the days that the five international probes encounter the comet, all of Columbia's eyes will be on Halley's. One of the Astro-1 telescopes will peer at very short wavelength light to see if it can detect such elements as helium, neon and argon, which would reveal something about what temperatures were like at the time the solar system...