Word: floodplains
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...those vaguely irritating phrases that sink to the bottom of public discourse and stay there like sludge. The mind's response, after the 20th hearing, is a weary "Yeah, yeah." Got to get the kids off to school. Got to invest in a hog factory, build on a floodplain, send bigger boats after fewer fish. Write a check to Greenpeace. Buy Exxon Mobil. And be sure to pick up some bottled water...
...atypically peaceful scene for those dino-eat-dino days. Amid the shallow streams of a broad floodplain, scores of huge, grazing female dinosaurs were making their nests and hovering near their eggs, as their predecessors had doubtless done for ages untold. But their tranquillity was suddenly disturbed. Out of nowhere came a flood of mud and silt, scattering the lumbering beasts and burying their progeny. The lively dinosaur nursery was lost forever...
There was, of course, no one in Mars' Ares Vallis floodplain to mark the moment when NASA's 3-ft.-tall Pathfinder spacecraft dropped into the soil of the long-dry valley. But there was a planet more than 100 million miles away filled with people who were paying heed when it landed, appropriately enough, on July 4. For the first time in 21 years, a machine shot from Earth once again stirred up the Martian dust. More important, for the first time ever, it was going to be able to keep stirring it up well after it landed. Curled...
Just getting Pathfinder from Cape Canaveral to Ares Vallis required a remarkable bit of cosmic sharpshooting. Mars is only 4,200 miles across--about half as big as Earth--and the floodplain NASA was aiming for is only 60 miles wide. The barest flutter in the spacecraft's trajectory could have caused Pathfinder to swing far wide of its destination. To prevent the ship from straying too far from its ideal path, the flight plan included five different opportunities for midcourse corrections during which the spacecraft's thrusters could be fired to refine the trajectory. Over the course...
Though Sojourner won't get anywhere fast, where it does go should hold a lot of secrets. Ares Vallis was chosen as the landing site in the first place because the now dusty basin was once the largest known floodplain in the solar system. Water rushed into the valley at up to 170 m.p.h., carrying a giant spelunker's bag of rocks with it. Without venturing very far from where the lander set down, the rover could thus use its cameras and X-ray spectrometer to sample geology from all over the planet. Sojourner is scheduled to conduct these studies...