Word: instruments
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Shortly after midnight on Dec. 18, just five days after the shuttle Endeavour returned from the daring mission to repair the Hubble telescope, scientists secretly put the refurbished instrument to its first test. They ordered the Hubble to point toward a bright star and beam its image to Earth. Anxiously, they crowded around a computer screen at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, as they waited for the picture to appear. The Endeavour astronauts had installed the telescope's corrective lenses and other equipment perfectly. But it wasn't certain that the devices would actually work...
Technological razzle-jazzle has energized rock music ever since the Moog- and-groove, sound-and-light-show days of the '60s. The synthesizer, a . computerized one-man band, has become the instrumental instrument in many a rock group. Heavy-metal outfits like Guns N' Roses and Metallica, as well as such megatheatrical performers as Janet Jackson and David Bowie, have shown that computerized control of stage lighting creates a wide range of effects. The Grateful Dead, on a perpetual postmortem tour, keeps things fresh with computerized psychedelia synchronized to the music and projected on big screens...
...only non-Christmas tune the band played was a stirring version of "The 10,000 Men of Harvard." Apparently stirred by the rhythms himself, a tuba player marched out into the audience, putting the mouth of the instrument over several audience members' heads...
Perhaps the best single illustration of NASA's strategy for the future is the SeaStar satellite, a part of the Mission to Planet Earth. Built under dramatically streamlined management, SeaStar does double duty as a scientific instrument and a boost for U.S. competitiveness -- the "dual use" concept that President Clinton wants all U.S. research labs to embrace...
...more useful programs. Yet the main justification for the shuttle is the space station, and vice versa. Supporters of manned space shots note that the Hubble could never have been repaired without human hands; opponents argue that without NASA's insistence that the telescope be launched by shuttle, the instrument could have gone up in the late 1970s, at a fraction of its eventual cost and into a higher, more useful orbit to boot...