Word: orbit
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...often at our mercy. The wild- eyed man blocks the subway-car aisle, slinging curses and entreaties. The gray madonna and her smudges of children hover outside the church, despair incarnate. The glib hustler in designer jeans glides down the movie line. The kids with the grimy windshield rags orbit the intersection. The old man with no eyes sits on the steam grates in winter in a wet cloud of pain. The obsequious panhandler waits outside the automated-teller machines, where wallets are full and walls are transparent. Somehow, always never seemed so often...
...reports said the missile was designed to carry a nuclear warhead and could travel 900 nautical miles, far enough to strike Soviet territory. But intelligence sources now say the exercise had an additional purpose: to test the country's capability of launching a surveillance satellite into low earth orbit...
Because the suspected planets are lost in the glare of the stars they orbit, they could not actually be seen. Instead, the astronomers analyzed the shifts of light in the spectrum associated with a star as it moves. A shift toward red means the source is moving away from the observer, toward blue that it is moving toward him. By carefully measuring these color shifts, astronomers detected a characteristic wobble in the motion of the stars that could be caused by the gravitational pull of a nearby orbiting body...
That is just what the Soviets plan to do. In 1992, when America's Mars Observer is scheduled to fly, they hope to send a third Phobos spacecraft into Mars orbit carrying advanced remote-sensing devices, including a radar mapper that will seek out the best landing sites for future missions. Two years later, the Soviets intend to launch a pair of highly sophisticated landers to Mars. Each will carry a small computer-controlled surface rover, a six-wheeled vehicle capable of traveling as far as 60 miles from the lander. It will be equipped with TV cameras, scoops...
...eyes, would seek out appropriate rock samples and stow them in a craft designed to return them to earth for analysis. At NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., experts are designing living quarters for the space station that the U.S. hopes to begin assembling in earth orbit in the mid-1990s. Plans call for private sleeping cubicles, each equipped with a TV, sound systems and a computer. Mars enthusiasts point out that approval of a manned Mars mission as a goal would finally provide a compelling rationale for the projected $30 billion space station that NASA...