Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wasn't exactly a display of super strength. The "grip," generated by four polymer strips designed to bend in response to electrical charges, was barely noticeable. But that force is more than enough for the individual strips to wipe dust from the windshield of a palm-size rover that NASA and the Japanese space agency isas will use to explore an asteroid in 2003. "Clearing dust may not seem like a big deal," says Yoseph Bar-Cohen, a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who created the muscles. But using old-fashioned gears and motors, he says, would make...
Gordon's latest work--a fine, well-acted film, by the way--is based on the memoir Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam Jr., a former engineer at NASA who grew up in a small West Virginia coal town in the late '50s hoping to pursue a career in rocketry. This was against the wishes of his father, who in the movie says things like, "Quit wastin' time worryin' about Wernher von Braun," and "By golly, you'd find out [about life in the mines] soon enough...
...Homer makes good; and two, one of the film's final images is of Dad's arm giving Homer's shoulder a paternal blessing as a rocket soars impossibly high into a deep blue sky--a male-weepie moment to rival Field of Dreams' climax. An entire audience of NASA brass and astronauts was reportedly broken up at a preview screening in Washington, although when I checked this out with former astronaut Jim Lovell, the commander of the Apollo 13 mission, he gave me a cagey "not really" when I asked if he had cried. He also said he didn...
What's more, the entire mission is coming in at an absurdly cheap (for NASA) $165.6 million. Stardust is part of the space agency's "fast and cheap" Discovery series (Mars Pathfinder with its robot rover was another). Like Pathfinder (and unlike the instrument-packed billion-dollar probes of the 1970s and '80s), Stardust is as stripped down as it can be. The 848-lb. spacecraft carries just solar panels, a camera, a radio, a spectrometer to analyze sunlight bouncing off the comet, a few sensors and the all-important sample-collecting system...
...technological challenges of the plane mission are daunting. "The agency must be able to deliver and then fly a planelike craft in an atmosphere that is 1 percent as dense as the atmosphere of Earth," says Kluger. "It's an ambitious undertaking, but NASA has succeeded in meeting challenges like this in the past." Until the plane mission lifts off, NASA is putting its eggs in two more conventional modes of exploring the planet: Within the year, a polar orbiter will be surveying Mars and a lander will arrive to study what lies beneath its surface. Martians, beware: The Earthlings...