Word: halley
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...inhabitants of earth, the third closest planet to the star, the long- awaited spectacle had begun. After a 75-year sojourn through the solar system, Halley's (rhymes with valley's) comet had again swung into view, but just barely. At Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson one night last month, several large telescopes tracked the approaching comet, projecting images that flickered across television monitors. But like countless amateur stargazers around the world, the astronomers wanted to see the cosmic celebrity with their own eyes. Huddled in the chill mountain air outside an observatory dome, necks craned, binoculars raised, they...
...visible tail, and 58 million miles away from earth, the comet looked like little more than a smudged and dusty fingerprint. Or, as Hyron Spinrad, a cosmologist from the University of California, Berkeley, declared, "It's a wimp." Still, everyone was delighted. For the skywatchers, the appearance of Halley's was a once-in-a- lifetime event, and they viewed it as a sort of psychological and even spiritual landmark. Said Astronomer Susan Wyckoff of Arizona State University in Tempe: "Just to see it at all is a thrill...
...astronomers and other scientists, the thrill goes far beyond a squint through an eyepiece on a shivery night. Although experts warn that Halley's latest go-round -- or apparition, as they call it -- could be the dimmest of the 30 visits in recorded history, from a scientific standpoint it will be nothing short of the Fourth of July. Next March, as Halley's speeds toward its closest approach to earth, it will be greeted by five diminutive, instrument-crammed space probes, two launched by Japan, two by the Soviet Union and one by the eleven nations of the European Space...
...ultraviolet telescopes and two wide-angle cameras. For much of the mission, the instruments will be studying such exotica as quasars, black holes and globular clusters, but for a while during the days that the five international probes encounter the comet, all of Columbia's eyes will be on Halley's. One of the Astro-1 telescopes will peer at very short wavelength light to see if it can detect such elements as helium, neon and argon, which would reveal something about what temperatures were like at the time the solar system formed. If neon were detected, for example, scientists...
NASA scientists insist that given the briefness and the danger of the flybys, Astro-1 could actually end up gleaning more information about Halley's than the probes do. "Our mission may not be as dramatic," says Knox Long, a Johns Hopkins University scientist on the Astro project, "but we're getting the most bang for the buck...