Word: orbital
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...also studied planet formation and the physics of planets and their atmospheres. In 1976, Cameron challenged contemporary beliefs with his new theory for the origin of the moon. He argued that an object at least the size of Mars struck our planet, causing fragments to be strewn into orbit around the Earth. The debris then coalesced into what is now known as the moon. This “giant impact” theory is now widely accepted in the scientific community. Professor Avi Loeb, who worked alongside Cameron from 1993-1999 in the Department of Astronomy said his work...
...Meet The New Planets" discussed some of the recently discovered planetlike objects that are orbiting our sun [Oct. 24] and the difficulty astronomers are having in deciding what is a planet. How about defining a planet as an object that is massive enough to be squeezed into a spherical shape by gravity, does not orbit another such object and orbits the sun in the same plane as the eight objects that we considered planets before 1930? Then Pluto and others with tilted orbits could be called planetoids. There, that was easy...
...telescopic photograph, nine planets. Memorizing those nine names has long been a childhood rite of passage, up there with learning to tie your shoes. Yes, Pluto was always an oddball: not only is it tiny (two-thirds the size of our moon), but it has a weird, elongated orbit that is tilted at a sharp angle to the plane the other planets inhabit. Still, the gap in size between Pluto and the biggest asteroids was comfortably huge...
...even more discoveries waiting in the pipeline (they've put their logs behind a firewall to keep prying competitors away) and they're not done yet. Just about all the new worlds have been found by looking even farther outside the plane of the solar system than Pluto's orbit. "Nobody really expected to see anything way up there," says Brown. "But based on what we've found so far, we expect to find at least two or three more of these...
...That will be no easy task. With budget constraints making a completely new rocket class unlikely any time soon, Japanese engineers are examining ways to refit the H-2A, originally designed primarily to carry satellites into orbit, for human flight. That's why a current project to turn an H-2A capsule into a cargo ferry bringing supplies to the ISS and returning a payload of garbage to Earth has become a particularly important dry run?a demonstration of the feasibility of using the H-2A system to transport humans into space and to get them home safely...