Word: halley
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...three days a fast-walking visitor can hop across continents by taking a boat down the Yangtze River, touching an exact model of the Soviet spaceship that ventured through Halley's comet and seeing John Lennon's flower-decorated Rolls-Royce. One of the chief delights of most visitors seems to be filling Expo passports with the stamps of each country. Children, adults, everyone wants a stamp. When the emblem of the Ivory Coast failed to arrive during the first week, a slim young woman in a long black-and-white dress made do by patiently writing in each book...
Still, it is tempting to poke around, especially among the new features that appear with dizzying regularity. For example, during the height of the comet craze, CompuServe users could type GO HALLEY and shop electronically for comet locator maps, reading lists, Halley hats and a T shirt emblazoned with HEAVENLY BODY OF THE YEAR. They could also find directions to prime U.S. viewing spots, sign up for comet-watching ocean cruises, enter weekly comet . trivia quizzes and participate with dozens of other Halley's addicts in an onscreen round-table discussion of comet news and lore...
...space station, a daring repair mission to restart that station after a near total power failure, and a highly sophisticated radar mapping of Venus by two robot Venera probes. Earlier this month the Soviets dazzled the international scientific community with their Vega 1 and Vega 2 inspections of Halley's comet. Each Vega flyby was preceded by a swing past Venus to drop an instrument-laden balloon into the planet's dense atmosphere...
Vega 1's camerawork was a triumph of technology. While whipping by Halley's at a speed of 175,000 m.p.h. (relative to the comet), the spacecraft's TV cameras shot some 500 pictures in about three hours. Transmitted across 109 million miles of space, each picture took nine minutes to arrive in Moscow, where it was colored by computer to emphasize differences in brightness. The first images showed only the coma, the great cloud of gas and dust surrounding the nucleus, as a fuzzy, violet-fringed, blue-green ball with a yellow center. But in images that Vega...
Vega 1 also served as a pathfinder for two other craft in the Halley's flotilla. By helping scientists determine the comet's precise path, it enabled them to make accurate last-minute corrections in the courses of Vega 2 and Giotto. The second Vega was to pass within 5,000 miles of the comet on March 9, supplementing Vega 1's findings. Giotto's mission four days later was to swoop to about 300 miles of the nucleus, shooting close-up pictures as it passed. Precision pathfinding was less important for the Japanese craft. Suisei, designed to study...