Word: moons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some of the faces seemed out of a distant past. William Rogers, the New York City lawyer and former Secretary of State who had lost Washington turf battles to Henry Kissinger in the Nixon Administration. Neil Armstrong, who had taken "one giant leap for mankind" on the moon in 1969. Richard Feynman, the Caltech physicist who won his Nobel Prize 20 years ago. Others were fresher, including Astronaut Sally Ride, who in 1983 became the first American woman in space. They and nine other experts were appointed last week to a presidential commission charged with finding out why the space...
Building an Orient Express will be one of the most daunting challenges that the U.S. aerospace industry has faced since it helped put astronauts on the moon. Lockheed, Boeing and Rockwell have all been working on the conceptual designs for a space plane. At the moment, says one industry consultant, "it's just a gleam in everyone's eye." But what a gleam: the plane would take off on a conventional runway and fly into orbit like a rocket. It could launch satellites, much as the space shuttle has done, or it could simply whisk U.S. passengers from coast...
Scientists at J.P.L. seemed most fascinated by Voyager's close-up views of the five major Uranian moons. By far the most exotic was Miranda, about 300 miles across and the closest of the large moons to the planet. Miranda, Geologist Laurence Soderblom explained, "is a bizarre hybrid," combining at least ten different types of terrain, some similar to the "valleys and layered deposits of Mars . . . the grooved terrain of Ganymede (a moon of Jupiter) and the depression faults of Mercury." The crusts of Miranda and three of the four other major moons, Soderblom said, "have been tectonically shuffled...
Both Titania and Oberon, each some 1,000 miles in diameter, have huge, distinctive features. Voyager spotted a three-mile-high mountain on Oberon and a valley running all the way across the visible surface of Titania. On the moon Ariel, 730 miles across, three linear patterns seemed to resemble the tracks left by terrestrial glaciers. Only Umbriel, 740 miles in diameter and covered with overlapping meteorite craters but with few other features, seems to have been largely unaffected by Uranian gravity--for reasons scientists cannot explain...
...quite different from those of Saturn, which contain an abundance of fine particles. The Uranian rings are made largely of dark "boulders," most of them more than a yard wide, that circle the planet once every eight hours. Many scientists believe they may be the remnants of a large moon that shattered in an ancient cataclysm...