Word: orbitals
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...strike Earth, another newly discovered asteroid is causing concern. This one is 1999 AN10, a kilometer-wide hulk that in 2027 could hurtle past us as little as 20,000 miles away. First spotted in January, the asteroid attracted little attention when Italian astronomers posted preliminary calculations of its orbit on their website. But when these results were repeated on CCnet, a widely read e-mail network, some astronomers were outraged. They felt an unwarranted repeat of last year's scare would be the astronomical equivalent of crying wolf and could lead to public indifference. But news of 1999 AN10...
...last only five," says Kluger. "Most of those years were smooth and uneventful." Now Mir's current crew will be its last. The three cosmonauts will abandon ship in August after installing a new computer allowing ground controllers to command the station remotely. From that point Mir's orbit, currently about 240 miles above Earth, will begin to tighten. When it reaches 125 miles, the Russians will pick an ocean -- unlike Skylab, which NASA dangerously allowed to deorbit itself -- and send the 120-ton station its final command. And then, says Kluger, "the last vestiges of the Russian space empire...
After 13 years in orbit, the world's first -- and greatest -- orbiting jalopy has been scheduled for a Viking funeral. Russian space officials announced Tuesday that unless private funding (Donald Trump? Michael Jackson?) comes to the rescue, the space station Mir will be abandoned to die a fiery death in the Earth's atmosphere sometime in spring...
...Gemini astronauts of the 1960s never much cared for flying into space atop a Titan 2 rocket. Originally built as a military missile, the Titan had a tendency to leap off the pad and scream into orbit with a suddenness that plastered even the most hardened pilot against his seat. Punishing as the Titans of the 1960s were, however, there was one thing you could say for them: they got where they were going...
...American rocketry up to it? Earlier this week, and for the third time in a month, a U.S. rocket failed to lift its satellite payload into the proper orbit. On Tuesday, the second-stage boosters failed on a Boeing-made Delta III; in April, two Lockheed Martin Titan IVs fell short of their target orbits. The mission cost of the latest Delta failure, an Orion communication satellite that wound up in a lopsided orbit, was $230 million. That is the kind of money satellite companies don?t generally like to see blast off into nothing...