Word: orbit
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...gawped at Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show. He thought Jerry Lee Lewis on Steve Allen's TV program was the wildest and altogether greatest thing he had ever set eyes on. When Chuck Berry showed up on American Bandstand, one young world got jolted into a different orbit. The music was that strong. All velocity and no drag...
...space probe is finally approaching its last port of call. Having made historic flybys of Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1981 and Uranus in 1986, it is poised for an Aug. 24 rendezvous with Neptune, the most distant of the giant planets. (It will not encounter Pluto, whose bizarre orbit now places it closer to the sun than Neptune is.) Voyager's aging cameras and electronic sensors are somewhat impaired, and the probe is so distant that its signals take four hours to travel to earth. Still, scientists expect mounds of fresh data and some 8,000 photographic images, entirely...
Though Voyager is still about 22 million miles from Neptune, it has already made several discoveries. It has found a new moon to add to the known duo, % Triton and Nereid. Labeled 1989-N1, the object is between 125 and 400 miles across and has a surprisingly ordinary orbit. Like most moons, 1989-N1 orbits nearly over its planet's equator and in the same direction as the planet's rotation, implying that it formed with or soon after Neptune...
...contrast, Triton, which is about the size of earth's moon, orbits in the opposite direction. That has led astronomers to guess that Triton might be a large asteroid that was captured by Neptune's gravity. Such an intrusion should have disrupted the paths of any existing moons. This would explain tiny Nereid's highly elongated and tilted orbit. But 1989-N1 is just "sitting there," says Voyager project scientist Torrence Johnson, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Johnson expects that the probe will discover more moons, shedding light on Triton's origins. "All of the outer planets have lots...
...about Lee Atwater as campaign manager. To % allay those concerns, Atwater invited one of the brothers to join the campaign organization full-time. So George, Laura and their twin daughters moved to Washington for the duration. After a dozen years of independence, he was back in his father's orbit being called Junior...