Word: orbitally
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...running before the 1980s were out. Currently, the outpost is still incomplete, it has returned not a lick of real science and is projected to cost up to $100 billion. The shuttles, which were advertised as a cheap, fast, reliable way to get to and from near-Earth orbit, cost $400 million every time they fly, take months to prep for a mission and have a devastatingly poor safety record, as two lost ships and 14 lost lives attest...
...loss of JPL's Mars Sample Return mission and a possible flight to Jupiter's icy moon Europa. The sample return project would be the capstone to a Mars exploration initiative that since 1996 has placed three rovers on the surface of the planet and two other ships in orbit around it, with a third orbiter set to arrive next week. Scrapping the Europa mission would be an even greater failure of imagination since the Jovian moon is widely considered the solar system's most tantalizing extraterrestrial place, with what may be a warm, salty, organic ocean churning beneath...
...team of NASA scientists was trying to fix the distorted lenses in the Hubble telescope, which was already in orbit. An expert in optics suggested that tiny inversely distorted mirrors could correct the images, but nobody could figure out how to fit them into the hard-to-reach space inside. Then engineer Jim Crocker, taking a shower in a German hotel, noticed the European-style showerhead mounted on adjustable rods. He realized the Hubble's little mirrors could be extended into the telescope by mounting them on similar folding arms. And this flash was the key to fixing the problem...
When NASA first considered a mission to Pluto more than 15 years ago, the idea was to visit the last and most distant of the nine planets, an oddball whose icy composition, tilted orbit and tiny size made it unlike anything else in the solar system. But when the New Horizons probe finally takes off from Cape Canaveral?as early as next week, if all goes well?it will be heading for something else entirely. "This little misfit is now central to our understanding of the origin of our solar system," says Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute...
...ORBIT OF PLUTO ? From Pluto, the sun appears about 1,000 times as dim as it does from Earth ? Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, are locked in synchronous orbit, always keeping the same face toward each other...