Word: cometted
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Early on Christmas morning, just before the faintest glimmerings of dawn over the Pacific, a group of scientists from the U.S., West Germany and Britain will begin their holiday celebrations by monitoring a unique experiment: the creation of the first man-made comet. A satellite orbiting some 70,000 miles above earth will release four canisters containing about 90 lbs. of barium and copper powder, worth $240,000. The powder will swell into a gaseous cloud 100 miles across that will glow pale yellow-green and then a dusky purple; as it expands, the cloud will grow a comet...
...precise shape and behavior of the comet will give scientists insights into an array of physics problems, particularly some of the interactions between the sun and the earth. The release is part of a study of the magnetosphere, the powerful magnetic bubble that surrounds the earth; of the solar wind, the stream of supersonic particles that blows from the sun out to the planets; and of the bow-shock region, which lies between them. Aware of the comet's seasonal significance, NASA, one of the mission's main participants, has only too happily dubbed the performance the "Christmas...
...first experiment, begun last fall, the satellites provided some indication that the magnetosphere presents a more solid barrier to the solar wind than had previously been believed. Soaring beyond the magnetosphere, the Christmas comet will enable scientists to study the effects of the solar wind on an object without a magnetic field. The West German satellite will release the barium, while the British craft records the progress of the comet, measuring the tail and noting how long it takes for the solar wind to disperse it. The U.S. satellite will track how much barium is able to penetrate the magnetosphere...
Swinging within about 55 million miles of the sun every 76 years, Halley's comet has been an object of awe since what may have been the first reported sighting, by Chinese astronomers in 240 B.C. But when this cosmic snowball of ice and dust-with a nucleus between 3 and 6 miles across and a tail millions of miles long-streaks across the sky in 1986, it will be greeted for the first time by five spacecraft. In the vanguard of an international effort to study the comet, the Soviet Union recently launched two 4.5-ton unmanned space...
Scientists complain that as the Administration proposes to pour money into Star Wars and the space station, it is cutting back on unmanned missions. For instance, NASA passed up an opportunity to sail through the tail of Halley's Comet in 1986 (the Soviets and Europeans have scheduled Halley rendezvous). Laments Sagan: "Those space vehicles were very cheap. For just 1% of the cost of Star Wars, you could have a set of spectacular missions from now to the beginning of the next century. The answer to the origins of the universe might be within our grasp. It would...