Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...generation ago -- stands as a cautionary reminder of the perils of perestroika. The combination of glasnost and demokratizatsiya runs the risk of giving conservatives the chance to point to a breakdown in social order. This is a major consideration in one of the most order-obsessed regimes on earth. Gorbachev's situation, like the fate of his reforms, will thus remain precarious...
Randall Adams did not complain when Continental Flight 140 from Houston to Columbus took off 20 minutes behind schedule last Thursday. He was already twelve years late leaving Dallas County, Texas, which he says had become his "hell on earth." In 1976, several weeks after Adams found a job repairing pallets, he was arrested for the slaying of a Dallas policeman. At one point, with only three days to spare, he was saved from execution by a U.S. Supreme Court stay while the Justices considered a legal technicality...
Come December, NASA plans to use a shuttle to send aloft the Hubble Space Telescope. The so-called ST will fly above the earth's atmosphere, whose turbulence limits the clarity of astronomical photos taken from the planet's surface. The ST's forte will thus be the sharpness of its pictures, which astronomers hope will help answer long-standing questions about the structures of distant galaxies and mysterious pinpoints of light called quasars, and about whether other stars have planets similar to earth...
Another burst of information should come in August, when Voyager 2 makes the last swing on its grand tour of the outer planets. Launched in 1977, the probe has already accumulated scientific data and taken spectacular pictures at Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. Next stop: Neptune. From earth, Neptune appears as a tiny, fuzzy green ball of light, and its major moon, Triton, as an orange dot. Voyager will provide the first closeup view of both. Triton is especially tantalizing, since it is believed to have its own thin atmosphere of methane, and may be partly covered by oceans of liquid...
...probe to study the sun's polar regions. But some experts worry about relying too heavily on the shuttle. "I certainly hope that these missions will go off as planned," says James Van Allen, the University of Iowa physicist who discovered the Van Allen radiation belts that ring the earth. "But the shuttle is not out of the woods yet. After Challenger, NASA should have made a decision to go to expendable rockets for all space science...