Word: descented
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...TiVo, the nail-biting scene at NASA as controllers watched the descent had a curious familiarity to it. Engineers whooped at every milestone just as football fans cheer every pass in a prerecorded game--even though in both instances they know the end of the tale is already writ...
...Because of the spacecraft's risk-filled landing, it could have easily been a nightmare-more than half of all Mars missions have ended in failure. Sitting in the mission control room during the final moments of the descent is like riding the bench during a baseball no-hitter: no one wants to jinx the outcome, so no one says a word. "Seven minutes of terror" is how Smith described the communications blackout as the spacecraft passed through the Martian atmosphere. One flight technician fidgeted with his pen. A few others rocked back and forth in their chairs, tension lines...
...NASA's rover missions did not use rockets to cushion their landings - the spacecraft were protected by giant airbags and bounced their way to a stop on the surface. The Phoenix is the first spacecraft in 32 years to gently settle on Mars, using 12 descent engines reminiscent of techniques pioneered by the Viking probes in the 1970s. NASA says the craft is safely resting on its three pads, tilted by only one-quarter of a degree. "In my dreams it couldn't have gone as perfectly," said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager...
...Stress, first posted May 1 by Justice (Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay) on the website of rap artist and producer Kanye West, is a seven-minute video depicting a group of French adolescents, visibly of African and North African descent, wreaking havoc as they swarm from their neglected homes in the outskirts or banlieues of Paris into the heart of the city, all to a grueling, nightmarish electro beat. Followed by a camera crew from their housing project to Sacre Coeur to Charles de Gaulle airport, they harass women, break a bottle over a café owner...
...Hispanics like Murillo now constitute 7.9 percent of the student body at Harvard. Although this statistic has grown in recent years, it still feels nothing like her home in Ventura County, Calif., where two-thirds of the population is of Hispanic descent...