Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Planned 18 percent increase in the budget of the National Science Foundation, which endows over $100 million of Harvard's federally sponsored research, and similar hikes in the research allocations for NASA and the Department of Energy, could result in more dollars for Harvard research, officials said...
...NASA Astronomer Robert Preston and his wife Ann, an artist, came upon the evidence serendipitously while visiting Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park. The Prestons noticed some old Indian petroglyphs, the technical name for the spirals, crosses, lizards, birds and other rock carvings found throughout the Southwest. Anthropologists have tended to view them as little more than ancient graffiti, but the Prestons saw a message. As sunlight filtered between two large rocks, it formed dagger-like beams that swept tantalizingly across the petroglyphs. At once the Prestons suspected that the carvings might be a little solar observatory...
While the rest of the world anxiously watched and waited, the Soviets struggled last week to keep one of their spy satellites from plunging prematurely and dangerously back to earth. The high drama was reminiscent of NASA's unsuccessful attempt to control the fall of Skylab four years ago, when fragments of the unmanned U.S. space station harmlessly hit the Australian outback. But the problem with the Soviet satellite had a particularly frightening element. Aboard the faltering Red star was some lethal cargo: a miniature nuclear power plant that could spray deadly radioactive material over a wide swath...
...satellites, but flights resumed in 1980. Moscow insists that the reactors do not violate any treaty. The U.S. has not pressed the issue. For one thing, the Defense Department is itself considering using reactors to power laser and particle-beam weapons that may eventually be deployed in space. Also, NASA has already sent nuclear power packs to the moon and uses them regularly on robot spacecraft to the outer planets, like the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn and beyond. (Reason: sunlight is too weak to be tapped as an energy source...
...important to remember that E.T. is also a movie, crafted as expertly as if it had come off the NASA assembly line. Every character has his own quirky resonance; each scene is energized by grace notes that reward all those subsequent viewings. But Spielberg had proved his directorial skill before ? with Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark ?while tapping the moviegoer's sense of fear and excitement. This time, though, he touched something more than a nerve ending. With E.T. he proved that the everyday could be unique, and that the science...