Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...NASA officials were admittedly nervous, but confident. "The space shuttle is ready to fly," said Shuttle Administrator Richard Truly, adding, "Even the weather is looking good...
...Another virus, called SCORES for the name of the bogus computer file it creates, first appeared in Apple Macintosh computers owned by Dallas-based EDS, the giant computer-services organization. But it spread rapidly to such firms as Boeing and Arco, and has since turned up in computers at NASA, the IRS and the U.S. House of Representatives...
Most recent breakthroughs in remote sensing came from satellites launched in the late 1970s. NASA's Seasat 1, Tiros N and Nimbus 7 satellites took indirect measurements of ocean conditions, such as surface wind speed and direction, by gathering data on radiation scattered by waves. At first, scientists had to correct their data for errors introduced by everything from sunspot activity to changes in the ozone levels of the upper atmosphere. "It wasn't just getting bigger computers, better instruments, better physics or better computer languages," says Robert Evans, a physicist at the University of Miami's Remote Sensing Laboratory...
Today satellite pictures of chlorophyll a, the best indicator of photosynthesis, are as reliable as readings taken directly from the water. Evans and NASA will soon begin releasing the global images to eager colleagues. "If we are to ask society to make trillion-dollar decisions, such as switching from coal to natural gas in order to reverse the greenhouse effect, we have to validate the models on which those decisions are based," says Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. "The primary productivity of the oceans is an essential component of any such model...
...Morton Thiokol facility in Utah; the failure of a seal on a booster was responsible for the Challenger disaster. In addition, Discovery has a pressure-vent-line leak in one of its orbital maneuvering system engine pods, which came to light several weeks ago. NASA says repairs to the OMS pod, which involve cutting through a bulkhead, could delay the launch anywhere from a week to two months. NASA insists that the repairs and continuing caution during the countdown will be sufficient to fly the orbiter with confidence. Perhaps, but Discovery's trip into space may be farther off than...