Word: descente
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...begun flooding the White House and Capitol Hill with telegrams demanding that NATO enlarge. Bob Dole and the House Republican Contract with America backed expansion. But White House polls during the 1996 campaign showed that enlargement wasn't a litmus test for the 21 million Americans of East European descent. The poll Clinton paid more attention to showed that foreign policy successes improved his re-election chances. "The idea that Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall, Bush unified Germany, and Clinton will unite Europe sounded good at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," says an aide...
...touchdown was not without problems. Early pictures revealed that one of the airbags that cushioned the craft during its descent had bunched up in a way that hindered the rover from leaving the lander. In addition, the computer aboard Sojourner and the one aboard Pathfinder were having trouble communicating with each other, which prevented the rover from getting the information it needed to rove beyond the immediate vicinity of the lander. But these problems, which engineers promptly set about fixing, did little to dampen the excitement when Pathfinder sent back its stunning panoramas of the eerie orange site where...
Pathfinder owes much to the trail-blazing Vikings, which snapped the high-resolution pictures that enabled Pathfinder scientists to choose an appropriate landing site. The Vikings also pioneered the heat-shield and parachute technology that contributed to Pathfinder's safe and remarkably precise descent...
...Viking 1 spent a month shooting detailed pictures of the surface, photos that enabled J.P.L. controllers to choose a safe spot for Viking 1's lander to touch down. On July 20, lander 1 separated from its orbiting mother ship. Using retrorockets, deploying a parachute and finally firing three descent engines, it bumped gently onto a rock-covered slope on the planet's southern hemisphere. Forty-five days later, the Viking 2 lander plopped down on more rugged terrain far to the north...
...this, merely to admire the purity of Devereaux's distilled exasperation, brought on by years of departmental politics and "the increasingly militant ignorance" of students. He was once a well-reviewed writer, though of only one book, and that short stories. But rather than agonize over their descent into professorial mediocrity, he and his colleagues, he decides, have "chosen, wisely perhaps, to be angry with each other rather than with ourselves." Wise enough. And when one addled prof goes off his medication and resumes cross-dressing, so is the counseling he receives: no pearls before...