Word: cosmically
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...five years, astronomers have been scanning the skies to become the first to sight one of history's most celebrated objects. Last week a Caltech team led by British Graduate Student David C. Jewitt, 24, and Staff Astronomer G. Edward Danielson, 43, won the cosmic sweepstakes. Using Palomar Observatory's 200-in. telescope, they spotted Halley's comet as a faint moving dot in the constellation Canis Minor. The comet has not been seen since 1911. A year earlier, its fiery appearance caused a rash of doomsday forecasts and end-of-the-world parties...
...most of her life, Grace Kelly's feet never touched the ground. So when she suffered a stroke last week that not only ravaged her brain but resulted in a car crash that mangled her body and seriously injured her daughter, it was almost as though some grand, cosmic accountant was exacting from her, in one lump sum, all the dues she never before had to pay. All along she had seemed exempt from the routine pains and troubles that plague the lives of ordinary folk. And then, in one swift and terrifying moment, Princess Grace fell to Earth...
...legend, she had plotted with her many brothers to kill their mother just as she was about to give birth to Huitzilopochtli. Instead, Huitzilopochtli sprang from the womb fully grown and armed, decapitated his matricidal sister and chased off his brothers. Some anthropologists read the myth as a cosmic drama in which Huitzilopochtli represents the sun, who must each day slay his sister (the moon) and disperse his brothers (the stars) in order to sustain his mother (the earth...
...being, however, the shuttle will not lack business. The Defense Department has booked a quarter of the flights scheduled through the 1980s. The first of the Pentagon payloads was carried aboard Columbia on its most recent mission. Though officials refused to talk about the contents, the packages included a cosmic-ray detector, ultraviolet and infra-red sensors for gauging the tracks of enemy missiles, and a space sextant that will enable satellites, or even the shuttle, to navigate without guidance from earth. During the last flight, the only references to the top-secret devices came in the form of cryptic...
Many other scientists were understandably cautious. In 1975 Berkeley Physicist P. Buford Price also thought he had found a monopole. Looking for cosmic rays, Price and three colleagues developed a multilayered plastic sandwich to record the tracks left by subatomic particles and launched the contraption over Iowa in a helium balloon. During three days, the particle detector recorded 75 hits, one much different from the rest. When Price published a paper claiming to have found a monopole "candidate," the scientific community's excitement soon gave way to skepticism. In the end, Price admitted he had been a bit hasty...