Word: cometted
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Democracy makes every man forget his ancestors. So thought De Tocqueville, the observer who for more than a century trapped the American character in his shrewd apercus. That character is too mutable to stay contained. Today it is frantically climbing family trees. After Haley's comet, not only blacks but all ethnic groups saw themselves whole, traceable across oceans and centuries to the remotest ancestral village (see LIVING...
...numbers, says Arthur Okun, a member of TIME'S Board of Economists, mean "the freeze thawed out quicker than we thought." He adds that the notion that the winter cold would do lasting damage to the economy "was the biggest fizzle since Kohoutek's comet." Just as the January figures were unduly depressed, current statistics might be distorted by the bounce back from the January slump. Nonetheless, the outlook seems bright-if inflation can be wrestled down...
Free and Inexhaustible. The fantastic voyage was proposed by a group commissioned by J.P.L. Director Bruce Murray to consider imaginative concepts for interplanetary exploration. A mission to Halley's comet, which returns every 74 to 79 years, has long been one of NASA's goals. But using conventional space-flight techniques to rendezvous and keep up with the glowing visitor-which reaches speeds of 198,000 kilometers (124,000 miles) an hour as it approaches the sun-would require enormous amounts of fuel and an impractically large and expensive rocket...
Ground controllers will then begin navigating the craft into closer and closer orbits of the sun by properly trimming the sail. Then they can put the ship-moving at a top speed of 198,000 kilometers (124,000 miles) an hour-on a course to intercept Halley's comet in March 1986. Jettisoning the sail, and "flying station" just two kilometers above the comet's head, the ship will take TV pictures and readings to determine the visitor's composition and origin. Says J.P.L.'s Murray: "We don't have a clue about comets...
Should plans for the space sailer hit a snag, earthlings could still get their first closeup view of Halley's comet in 1986. Another group at J.P.L. is working on the design of a spaceship that would be propelled by an ion engine; a small, continuous amount of thrust would be provided by the engine's ejecting ions produced when a beam of electrons (generated by electric current from solar cells) is sent through vaporized mercury. Such a low-thrust ion engine could, like the sunjammer's sail, maneuver a ship to a rendezvous with the comet...