Word: crafting
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...downtown Miami the drug busters have just finished building an ultramodern electronic command post that resembles the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise in Star Trek. Drug agents hover 24 hours a day over four multicolored radar screens that display the entire region's traffic. When authorities spot a suspicious craft, they quickly calculate which law- enforcement boats or planes can make the fastest interception. Then they dispatch the police craft with a state-of-the-art radio network that puts dozens of federal and local agencies on the same wavelength. Customs Service technicians built the system from scratch, starting with...
...equipped under their supervision by scientists from ten nations -- had become the first man-made object to record close-up views of a comet's coma and nucleus, and send the images and other data back to earth.* It also served as the advance guard for four other craft -- the Soviet Vega 2, the Japanese Suisei and Sakigake, and the European Space Agency's Giotto -- that were to sweep by Halley's in the following week...
Early evaluation of data from Vega 1 showed that the craft encountered less dust than expected as it approached the comet. But Physicist John Simpson of the University of Chicago, who designed the only American instrument -- a dust detector -- aboard Vega, noted that as the spacecraft departed, it passed through a "huge spike of dust" with particles about the size of those in cigarette smoke. Simpson and other scientists interpreted the spike as a burst of dust and gas erupting from the surface of the nucleus. Other Vega instruments seemed to show that the icy cometary surface was being evaporated...
Vega 1 also served as a pathfinder for two other craft in the Halley's flotilla. By helping scientists determine the comet's precise path, it enabled them to make accurate last-minute corrections in the courses of Vega 2 and Giotto. The second Vega was to pass within 5,000 miles of the comet on March 9, supplementing Vega 1's findings. Giotto's mission four days later was to swoop to about 300 miles of the nucleus, shooting close-up pictures as it passed. Precision pathfinding was less important for the Japanese craft. Suisei, designed to study...
...week's end scientists were worried about Giotto's chances. As they continued to interpret Vega 1's data, they discovered that its passage through the dust jet had damaged 45% of the craft's solar panels. During Giotto's much closer encounter with the comet, the European probe was bound to pass through far thicker clouds of dust on what some scientists characterized as a "kamikaze mission...