Word: nasa
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...bill calls for over one hundred programs which Congress plans to enact. These include addressing problems as diverse as community block grants, upgrading the forestry service, bridge removal, and NASA research funding. The remarkable thing about the legislation is that almost every program is ill-defined and subject to broad interpretation and a wide variation as to how it might be enacted...
...widespread component of the Milky Way. Pohl created his map using a kinetic model of the galaxy's gas flow, which was developed by Peter Engelmeier of the University of Zurich and Nicolai Bissantz of Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, based on infrared data collected by a NASA satellite. Unlike visible light, infrared light penetrates dust clouds, so it provided Engelmeier and Bissantz with more precise measurements, in turn allowing Pohl to produce a more accurate, if not perfect, map. "Our method works over much of the Milky Way but not everywhere," he says...
...then again, there aren't a lot of things like NASA's Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, the robotic ships that landed on the Red Planet five years ago this month with an expected lifespan of 90 days and yet have chugged along ever since - surviving paralyzing cold, blinding dust and long periods without sun, all of which occasionally left them silent and still, but only until conditions improved and they shook off the dust, stirred to life and puttered off to do more work. So far, Spirit and Opportunity have beamed home a quarter of a million images...
...dune buggy-size Spirit and Opportunity are the third in NASA's family of Mars rovers, descendants of the 2-ft.-long Sojourner craft, which arrived on Mars in the summer of 1997. Like its bigger siblings, Sojourner came with only a very brief factory warranty - just 30 days in its case - and like its bigger siblings, easily exceeded it, operating for five months before finally surrendering to the Martian elements. It's rarely a good idea to take NASA's estimates of the lifespan of its ships too literally. The agency tends to lowball these calls, making it more...
...that, aiming for vast basins that have the look of land that was once submerged. Spirit soon uncovered evidence of salts in the soil, a substance that would have been abundant in Martian seas, just as it is in Earth's. Opportunity discovered deposits of BB-sized pellets - which NASA nicknamed blueberries - that are rich in hematite, a mineral that forms only in watery environments. And by pure serendipity, in 2007 a balky wheel on Spirit dug a shallow trench in the ground, revealing the presence of white silica, another indicator of water. So far, neither rover has uncovered hard...