Word: nasa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There was, of course, no one in Mars' Ares Vallis floodplain to mark the moment when NASA's 3-ft.-tall Pathfinder spacecraft dropped into the soil of the long-dry valley. But there was a planet more than 100 million miles away filled with people who were paying heed when it landed, appropriately enough, on July 4. For the first time in 21 years, a machine shot from Earth once again stirred up the Martian dust. More important, for the first time ever, it was going to be able to keep stirring it up well after it landed. Curled...
Across the U.S. and much of the world, the ship's successful arrival was greeted with the most attention accorded an otherworldly landing since, perhaps, Apollo 11 touched down on the moon 28 years ago. At the Pasadena convention center, near NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the Pathfinder mission was being run, a standing-room-only crowd of more than 2,000 people whooped and wept as the pictures from Pathfinder streamed onto a 25-ft. screen. On the Internet, NASA sites that promised to post the pictures as soon as they became available recorded a staggering 100 million...
There was a little hyperbole in the President's remarks, but only a little. In the past several years NASA has been quietly reinventing itself. The slow and swollen agency that grew so fat in the post-Apollo years has been painstakingly downsizing itself to something approaching the agency it was first designed to be when it was founded in the late 1950s: a crew of garage engineers cobbling spacecraft from simple parts and getting the job done both on budget and on deadline...
...program of photographing and mapping the terrain below. Over the next eight years, up to eight more ships will follow. As these new probes are heading Marsward, others will be dispatched to places as familiar as the moon and as remote as Pluto. "In the next 10 years," says NASA administrator Daniel Goldin, "we'll be flying by, orbiting, landing, roving and bringing back samples from every critical planetary body in the solar system." In the wake of Friday's landing, it's hard not to believe...
WASHINGTON, D.C.: While Russian cosmonauts may be able to fix the power-thirsty Mir space station next week, repairing the growing cracks in the US-Russian Mir program may prove to be a far more difficult task, reports TIME's Dick Thompson. "While NASA insists that meaningful work can be achieved, many people believe that the only meaningful work that can be done now is learning survival skills in a leaking lifeboat. These critics are arguing more loudly than ever that the US-Mir program is not a science program at all, but a transparent tool of foreign policy designed...