Word: lasered
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...technology may have been flawless, but the people were not. Scientists at a U.S. Air Force ground station on a Maui mountaintop fired a laser beam 220 miles through space at a minute target, an 8-in. mirror attached to a hatch window on the left side of the space shuttle Discovery, which was speeding above the Hawaiian island at 17,500 m.p.h. The intention was to bounce the low-powered ribbon of light off the mirror and send it flashing back to Maui. But as the blue-green laser beam successfully "painted" the spacecraft over the test site...
Indeed, Discovery was turned 180 degrees in the wrong direction, with the mirror facing the darkness of space instead of the laser beam coming from earth. "We slipped up," said Flight Director Milton Heflin. Human error had ruined the first space shuttle experiment in President Reagan's $26 billion Star Wars research program last week. Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, it turned out, had given the astronauts the wrong numbers to feed into Discovery's computerized guidance system. Rather than pointing down at a 9,994-ft. mountain, the shuttle turned upward, searching for a nonexistent...
NASA tried again two days later. This time, with the shuttle pointed in the right direction, the laser beam flashed off the mirror for more than 2 1/2 min., creating a spectacular light show for Discovery's crew as they broadcast the booming strains of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture...
...test was designed to see how well a laser beam can remain fixed on an object in a low orbit around the earth, despite the distorting effect of the atmosphere. Such a capability is important because Star Wars planners want to station high-powered lasers on the ground, where they could be as big as necessary and easily maintained. These lasers would shoot beams up to orbiting mirrors, which would then direct the destructive light at incoming missiles...
Compact disks replace the old technology with a digital system based on computers and laser light. On a CD, sound is broken down into binary digits (zeros and ones). Those numbers are stored on an aluminum disk in some 15 billion microscopic pits. When the CD plays, rotating at up to 500 r.p.m., a laser silently scans the pits and then beams their information to a microcomputer that converts the digits back into sound. Because no mechanical part touches the disk's surface, the resulting tone is virtually free of distortion...