Word: dust
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...indeed a gamble. In the last seconds before the encounter, Giotto ran into what one scientist described as a "wall of dust the size of grains of sand." The spacecraft's protective dust shields were peppered with particles at a rate of 100 impacts a second, a bombardment that swung its antenna out of alignment with a tracking station in Australia. That brought communications to a halt. But before the blackout, Giotto relayed more than 2,000 images of Halley's back to earth, plus a torrent of data from the ten on-board instruments...
...least 2.5 miles wide, he said, and the surface, "velvet black and very irregular, with an indentation in the middle, like a peanut or a potato." On one side of the nucleus were what appeared to resemble nozzles, spewing out one minor and two major jets of gas and dust. Keller was puzzled by the blackness of the nucleus, which suggested that there is little or no ice on its surface. Astronomer Fred Whipple, whose concept of a comet as a "dirty snowball" was apparently confirmed by earlier findings of the Soviet Vega probes, offered a possible explanation: the comet...
Giotto's grand finale was preceded by the flybys of the second Soviet Vega and two Japanese craft. Early in the week, Vega 2 passed 5,125 miles from the comet's nucleus, sending back 700 pictures and confirming that the nucleus was solid. But the dust clouds encountered by the craft disabled nearly half of its solar panels and two of its experiments...
...broad ground that only officials who can be removed by the President should exercise Executive powers, a ruling that they say could jeopardize the independence of more than a dozen regulatory agencies ranging from the Federal Communications Commission to the Federal Reserve Board. "Independent agencies would bite the dust," warns Stanford University Law Professor Gerald Gunther. When Administration Lawyer Fried tried to assure the court last week that such arguments were simply a scare tactic, he got a quick reply from Justice O'Connor. "Mr. Fried," she said, "I'll confess you scared...
...offer grim handshakes and go home. The original purpose of the meeting--to set a date for a full-scale summit in the U.S. and work out a frame work for an agreement on medium-range missiles that could serve as its centerpiece--was lost in the dust. No deal, no date, no plans for future summits...