Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...near the edge of the thin disc of icy debris that forms Saturn's multi-hued rings. Finally, like a pebble in a great celestial slingshot, it was sent hurtling off toward Uranus on a new course created by the powerful pull of Saturn's gravity. NASA's new boss, James Beggs, hailed the flight as "one of the really great scientific achievements of our age." But he refused to commit the Reagan Administration to any new space endeavors, not even a mission to intercept Halley's comet on its reappearance in 1986 for the first...
Zeroing in on Saturn's moons, Voyager 2 discovered surprising contrasts between those icy little worlds. Hyperion, for example, is a small, distant moon shaped like a battered Idaho potato (or, as NASA scientists variously had it, a "hamburger patty" or a mouse-gnawed "hockey puck"). Tethys, closer in, is scarred by a huge crater more than a third as wide as the satellite's own 670-mile diameter, and by a canyon that extends at least two-thirds of the way around it. Apparently the moon was struck by a huge object and badly cracked...
...system was working. O'Donnell also called upon ALPA members to phone in any hazardous incidents and irregularities. "I can say without equivocation that the air-traffic control system in the country is safe," reported O'Donnell. Bill Reynard, chief of the Aviation Safety Reporting System, a NASA-managed monitoring agency, agrees. Says Reynard: "So far we haven't seen anything out of the ordinary that would cause us to pick up the telephone and call...
Last week the controversy was revived when Donald Heath, a physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, reported actual evidence of ozone depletion. His study, based on long-term weather satellite observations, indicated a reduction of about 1% in total ozone volume, with most of the losses concentrated at an altitude of about 25 miles. Though Heath acknowledged that his findings could not be tied directly to the chemicals, he pointed out that there is a suggestive link: calculations have shown that if chlorofluorocarbons were, in fact, damaging atmospheric ozone, the greatest harm would probably occur at about...
Herbert Wiser, an EPA science adviser, called the findings no more than "mildly suggestive." One problem, added Shelby Tilford, NASA'S chief of atmospheric processes, is that the amount of ozone may fluctuate with variations in the sun's ultraviolet radiation. To help settle the argument, Harvard's James G. Anderson plans to launch a huge balloon, 450 ft. in girth, in New Mexico next fall. Equipped with a battery of sensitive devices, its gondola will move up and down like a yo-yo through the upper atmosphere, between altitudes of 12 miles and 25 miles...