Word: orbital
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...spent dreaming about what he would do when he was king, Gingrich put everything on the table. At one "ideas meeting" of GOPAC charter members, he suggested that the government should offer an $8 billion reward, tax-free, to the first private enterprise that could put people into lunar orbit. And he even tried selling it as a deficit-reduction strategy. "If they do it, they just pre-empted nasa's $140 billion program. We saved $132 billion," he said...
This week, after a six-year, 2.3 billion-mile odyssey, a 2 1/2-ton, instrument-crammed spacecraft named after the Italian astronomer will hurtle past two of those moons, Europa and Io, then swing into orbit around Jupiter. There, if all goes well, it will conduct the most thorough study ever of the solar system's largest planet and its swarm of moons (Jupiter is known to have at least...
...Galileo goes into orbit, a probe that it will have released 147 days earlier will plunge into the upper Jovian atmosphere at 106,000 m.p.h., its heat shield glowing. Two minutes later, after friction has slowed its descent, the probe will deploy a parachute at around 400 m.p.h. and drift downward, sniffing at gases, measuring temperatures and pressures, observing cloud structures and lightning and transmitting data back to its mother ship. Finally, about an hour into its descent, the probe will be vaporized by the steadily increasing temperatures it encounters below the dense clouds. Its fate, says a NASA official...
...year, 2.3 billion-mile odyssey will culminate Thursday when the Galileo spacecraft swings into orbit around Jupiter. "The accuracy of this is really amazing," says TIME's Leon Jaroff. "Scientists were able to make incredibly precise calculations to place Galileo in exactly the right place, using Venus and the Earth in a 'crack-the-whip' maneuver to boost the probe's velocity to give it sufficient speed to make it all the way to Jupiter." Also Thursday, a smaller probe released from Galileo 147 days earlier will enter Jupiter's atmosphere. "There won't be any dramatic pictures, just...
...little more than five years ago, Bahcall was singing a much more melancholy tune. In May 1990, shortly after the Hubble went into orbit, engineers and scientists realized that something was horribly wrong. The telescope simply wouldn't focus properly--the result, it turned out, of a light-gathering mirror that had been ground with exquisite precision, but in the wrong shape. After a lengthy investigation, the disaster was laid to a simple, dumb mistake: a technician had assembled a device that guided the mirror-grinding process with one bolt put on backward. The hobbled Hubble could still do some...