Word: distantly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Riley has made an effort to make his officers more accessible to the community. In particular, the chief's plans are aimed at dispelling student opinion that the cops are either cold and distant or unprofessional...
...this week, Pioneer is 6 billion miles from Earth, making it the most distant man-made object in the universe. Its signals--barely discernible against the cacophony of background space noise--continue to register on the giant radio telescopes of NASA's Deep Space Network, reassuring scientists that Pioneer is still alive and calling home. Perhaps most remarkable, those signals emanate from an 8-watt transmitter, which radiates about as much power as a bedroom night light, and take more than nine hours to reach Earth...
Then, assisted by a powerful boost from Jovian gravity, the spacecraft hurtled toward deep space. Not far beyond Jupiter, scientists had expected Pioneer to find the boundary of the heliosphere, beyond which the solar wind (charged particles emitted from the sun) can no longer be detected. Yet as distant as Pioneer is today, it is still being wafted by solar breezes, and scientists now believe the elusive boundary could lie as far as 10 billion miles from the sun, and perhaps farther...
That is melancholy news not only for Wirth and other members of the Pioneer team but also for astronomer Frank Drake and his crew at the nearby Mountain View headquarters of seti. There, scientists hoping to pick up radio signals from a distant civilization have been using Pioneer's signals to test the efficacy of their detection systems. Says Drake: "It's been our prime diagnostic tool...
QUOTE OF NOTE: "I am campaigning on behalf of the family of the student who has to pay the high costs of a distant Congress, not the big-money interests in Washington that seek to increase its distance. We all have had enough...