Word: halley
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...abundant geothermal energy of Japan's volcanoes. In seismology, the Japanese are aggressively looking for early warning signals in their tremulous terrain. Though initially dependent on help from NASA, Japan's space agency is now launching satellites with its own rockets, and will attempt to intercept Halley's comet when that celestial object races around the sun in 1986; similar U.S. plans have been dropped. Even in fields where they are clearly behind, such as genetic engineering and cell biology, important to their national goal of finding a cancer cure, the Japanese have organized an effort...
...American astronomers, who are still deeply disappointed by the failure of the U.S. to send off a probe to intercept the most famous comet of all, Halley's, when it returns in 1986, IRAS-Araki-Alcock was a gift from heaven. At close encounter, it appeared as a blurry patch, about three times the diameter of the full moon, near the bowl of the Big Dipper...
...Halley 's heavenly body returns
...become the first to sight one of history's most celebrated objects. Last week a Caltech team led by British Graduate Student David C. Jewitt, 24, and Staff Astronomer G. Edward Danielson, 43, won the cosmic sweepstakes. Using Palomar Observatory's 200-in. telescope, they spotted Halley's comet as a faint moving dot in the constellation Canis Minor. The comet has not been seen since 1911. A year earlier, its fiery appearance caused a rash of doomsday forecasts and end-of-the-world parties...
Before Edmund Halley (pronounced Hal-ee) identified them in 1705 as periodic visitors to the inner solar system, comets were widely viewed as omens of disaster. Astronomers now look upon them as primordial chunks of matter that offer clues to the solar system's formation. The budget-conscious U.S. has bowed out of the race to intercept Halley's comet with a robot spacecraft, thus leaving the field to the Soviets, Western Europeans and Japanese. But NASA plans a relatively cheap ($2 million) alternative: diverting an unmanned ship already in orbit for an inspection of a comet called...