Word: fleeting
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There are moments in space exploration when fact and fantasy intertwine. The Mars Phoenix Lander, the latest of NASA's robotic fleet, demonstrated that after touching down in -58 F temperatures (-50 C) near the planet's north pole on May 25 at 7:38 p.m. EST. Television broadcasts relayed jubilant fist-pumps inside the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's mission control room in California along with initial images of the spacecraft's frigid new home. But a couple of blocks from the lab, two young boys riding bicycles had a more fanciful perspective. "The spaceship landed where Frosty lives...
...Mars Phoenix is just the latest in a small fleet of relatively inexpensive spacecraft (a few hundred million dollars apiece, which is tag-sale prices by spaceship standards) NASA has launched toward Mars in the last dozen years. The Mars Express and Mars Odyssey orbiters have done the true yeoman's work, extensively mapping the planet from high overhead. The Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity rovers have made the headlines, toddling around in the soil of the Red Planet and sending back portfolios of pictures. But it's Phoenix that could make the most thrilling discoveries...
...Count Fleet 11.8 sec. back [This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine.] Derby 2:04.0 Preakness 1:57.4 Belmont 2:28.2 Total...
...Most middle-class and wealthy Londoners were blissfully ignorant of conditions in Whitechapel until the autumn of 1888, when Scotland Yard realized that a serial killer was loose in the area, and Fleet Street helped create the legend - and even the name - of the knife-wielding "Ripper." Until the brutal slayings ended some two and a half years later, sensationalistic coverage of the Ripper was relentless, his exploits recounted by reporters and artists in a manner that exposed the squalor of Whitechapel to a fascinated audience - and shaped London's perception of the East End. Playwright George Bernard Shaw once...
Washington's anti-narcotics effort, meanwhile, already seems to be preparing for a future without Manta. The U.S. Navy now plans to revive the Fourth Fleet (which had been scrapped a half century ago), led by a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, to cruise the hemisphere's waters in part to search for drugs. The U.S. is also considering a replacement FOL in Colombia - which is, as the Andean crisis has so uncomfortably demonstrated to Washington, one of the few places left in the Americas where the Yanqui military is welcome...