Word: halley
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...funny thing happened on the way to Halley's comet last week. As an armada of Soviet, Japanese and European space probes hurtled through the cosmos toward their heralded meetings with the fabled comet next March, they were upstaged by a modest and almost archaic Ameri can spacecraft. The International Cometary Explorer whipped through the tail of an obscure apparition called Giacobini-Zinner, thereby becoming the first man-made object to encounter a comet...
...cometary tail to jubilant scientists tuned in at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. ICE's coup enabled American astronomers and space scientists to recover some of the patriotic and professional pride that was dashed in 1981 when Washington budget slashers vetoed a U.S. mission to Halley. "We wanted to make sure the U.S. didn't take a backseat to anyone," says NASA Spokesman James Elliott, "and we've done...
Farquhar's first thought was that ISEE-3 could be directed toward Halley, providing a drastically cheaper alternative to the more than $350 million that a new and more sophisticated mission would cost. He soon realized, however, that the radio on the diminutive probe was too weak to transmit data from 80 million miles away, the distance of Halley when it is most accessible to visiting earthships. Additional research suggested a less glamorous but more practical alternative: comet Giacobini-Zinner, which orbits the sun once every 6.5 years and could be easily visited when it was about 44 million miles...
...Halley, Jr. should learn how to slur. His excruciatingly enunciated diction gets very tiring play after play, and seems inappropriate for the low comic role of Costard. The same self-indulgence that drove Kilty to play Don Armado marks his performance...
...some 10 trillion miles from the sun. Passing stars sometimes dislodge snowballs from the cloud, which can sprout the classic luminous tails of gas and dust as they plunge toward the sun. Most comets whip around the sun and head back out of the solar system. Some, like Halley's, periodically return. But others crash into the sun or the planets, a fact confirmed in 1979 when a Defense Department satellite photographed a comet plunging to a fiery death...