Word: orbit
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...this may come as news to most of us, but astronomers, amateur and professional alike, have been buzzing about Hale-Bopp ever since its discovery nearly two years ago. At that point the comet was more than half a billion miles from the sun, well beyond the orbit of Jupiter, and invisible without a telescope. But not necessarily a huge telescope: like most comets, this one was found by a pair of amateurs as familiar with their favorite regions of the sky as most people are with their own neighborhoods...
...uncertainty has to do with the way comets are put together. They're basically chunks of ice--chiefly H2O with a fair amount of carbon dioxide and other frozen gases mixed in, plus a lot of sooty dust. Billions upon billions of comets orbit lazily out beyond Neptune--most of which we'll never even see. When one happens to fall in toward the sun, though, the ice begins to vaporize, surrounding the solid core with a hazy cloud of dusty...
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.: The Hubble Space Telescope is about to get an upgrade. Space shuttle Discovery and a crew of seven blasted into orbit at 3:55 a.m. Tuesday on a mission to modernize what has already been one of the projects of which NASA is most proud. "With a little luck and a couple weeks, the best telescope in the universe will be even better than it is now," commander Kenneth Bowersox said just before liftoff. Since its 1993 repair, the Hubble Space Telescope has consistently delivered breathtaking views of the universe as it existed almost at the beginning...
SHANNON LUCID First woman to receive Congressional Space Medal of Honor, for record 188 days in orbit...
...visits spacecraft and astronauts have made to the moon, they have limited their explorations to roughly equatorial areas, largely neglecting the polar regions. In 1994 NASA and the Pentagon launched a probe into a vertical lunar orbit that would reach those extreme latitudes...