Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...earth's nearest planetary neighbor has kept its surface tantalizingly hidden, Venus' veil is being lifted by a gifted robot. The Pioneer-Venus Or biter spacecraft has been circling the planet since December 1978, analyzing its atmosphere and scanning and rescanning its surface with radar. Last week NASA released the first renderings of these extraterrestial data, revealing a dramatic and awesome landscape still in the process of formation. Though 60% of the Venusian topography consists of flat rolling plains, it also includes four major highland regions, the highest being Ishtar Terra (named after the Assyrian goddess of love...
...dispose of radioactive wastes. Though countless schemes have been proposed for sealing the deadly stuff deep within the earth, few people seem willing to live on or near such a "hot" burial ground. Now scientists are suggesting another idea: banish the nuclear-age garbage to far-off space, using NASA'S shuttle as a kind of celestial dump truck when it finally flies, probably early next year...
...Three space engineers writing in the journal Astronautics & Aeronautics suggest parking the dangerous debris in an orbit far from any living thing, midway between the earth's own path around the sun and that of the neighboring planet Venus. Left there, say Claude Priest and Robert Nixon of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and Eric Rice of the Battelle Laboratories in Columbus, it would never come closer to the earth than 22.5 million km (14 million miles). The scheme would also be cheaper than sending the waste into the sun. Best of all, say the engineers...
...absolute guarantee against the workings of Murphy's Law (what can go wrong, will). But, they say, the risks are clearly calculable and precautions can be taken. Their enthusiasm is apparently shared in Washington. Last week, as part of a joint program with the Department of Energy, NASA awarded a $296,000 contract to the Boeing Co. Its purpose: to start up a four-year study on the possibility of exercising the space option for ridding the earth of nuclear wastes...
Surprised by this unexpected noise pollution from an experimental power plant that was supposed to be almost entirely free of environmental headaches, engineers from the U.S. Department of Energy and NASA flocked to Boone (pop. 8,754). Their findings: though the very low-frequency sound waves (about 2 cycles per sec.) from the windmill are below the usual range of human hearing, they can be amplified by wind and weather conditions and the terrain over which they are directed and thus become powerful enough to vibrate objects in the home...