Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...circled by a bewildering variety of spacecraft--about 600 in all--that have become indispensable to modern society: relaying phone calls, e-mail and faxes; monitoring hurricanes, terrorist activities and crop yields. A collision with a meteor could damage or disable any one of them. That is why NASA, the Air Force and the Russian space agency are directing a wholesale reorientation of their fleets of orbiting spacecraft...
...that velocity, says Guenter Riegler, a NASA senior scientist, a meteoroid as small as a dust particle could blast a hole nearly half an inch across in a solar panel or a layer of insulation. Equally threatening is the intense heat of impact, which would instantly vaporize the meteoroid and convert it to an ionized gas, or plasma, that would shock the spacecraft with an electrostatic charge. "If that charge got into some of your data circuitry," Riegler says, "it could wipe out data...
...Glenn is recovering more quickly, it may mean that the biological mechanisms behind aging-and zero-gravity-caused deterioration are indeed the same, said John Charles, of NASA's life-sciences division...
...taking careful measurements of the effects of gravity on an astronaut's health, including how he or she sleeps, both NASA and gerontologists hope to see if the mechanisms of space-and age-caused sleep disturbances are the same...
...will be a while, researchers say, before we know for sure. It may even be a while before the data from the flight is released to the general public. NASA is still grappling with privacy issues, including whether they should release John Glenn and other astronauts' medical information...