Word: halley
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...even more fanciful space trips. But none of these fictional voyages was as remarkable as the mission now being planned for NASA by scientists at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. If all goes well, they will launch an unmanned spacecraft guided with a giant sail to rendezvous with Halley's comet when it next approaches...
Free and Inexhaustible. The fantastic voyage was proposed by a group commissioned by J.P.L. Director Bruce Murray to consider imaginative concepts for interplanetary exploration. A mission to Halley's comet, which returns every 74 to 79 years, has long been one of NASA's goals. But using conventional space-flight techniques to rendezvous and keep up with the glowing visitor-which reaches speeds of 198,000 kilometers (124,000 miles) an hour as it approaches the sun-would require enormous amounts of fuel and an impractically large and expensive rocket...
...Astronomer Edmund Halley of comet fame showed that Sirius, Procyon and Arcturus had changed positions−relative to other stars−since Greek times, establishing for the first time that the stars were not fixed in the heavens. By the early 1900s, astronomers had learned that the sun was merely one of billions of stars in a disc-shaped galaxy, or island of stars, then believed by many to constitute the entire universe. In 1920 Harlow Shapley calculated that the galaxy, called the Milky Way, was some 300,000 light years* in diameter, a distance too stupendous for most people...
...Such stellar catastrophes are far too spectacular to escape general notice, and with the exception of Matthew, none of the Apostles or King Herod mentions such a brilliant star near the time that Jesus was born. Nor does a comet seem likely to have been the Christmas star. True. Halley's comet, which was first seen in 240 B.C., reappeared in 12 B.C. But that was several years before the earliest date on which Jesus could have been born. In any case, neither Halley's nor any lesser comets that appeared in succeeding years would have been regarded...
There are three solo parts in the Brandenburg, two for flutes and one for violin. Both flutists, Halley Schefler and Ann Hoffner, were in tune with each other and the orchestra. They played the andante with great delicacy. Their care and concentration were not duplicated by Lynn Chang, the violin soloist. Chang has an excellent reputation and has often carried the Bach Society violin section. While his playing in the first movement was controlled and understated, in the fugue he appeared hurried and ill at ease with the complex solo figurations. This was surprising since his technique far exceeds...