Word: orbitals
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...SPACE $60 million Estimated cost of launching a missile that the U.S. Navy hopes will destroy a potentially hazardous satellite 200 Number of industry experts and scientists working since January to modify the sea-based Aegis missile-defense system so it could bring down a satellite in low orbit...
...does smack into Mars, every telescope on Earth will be pointed in that direction - just as they were in 1994 when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter. In that case, the comet broke up while it was still in orbit, so astronomers watched nearly two dozen individual impacts. But Jupiter is made mostly of thick clouds, so there was no lasting scar, and because it lies so far from Earth, the event wasn't quite as spectacular as this one promises to be. Asteroid 2007 WD5 should release some 3 megatons of energy if it slams into solid ground...
PLAYING CATCH-UP Orbiting 200 miles above Earth at 17,500 m.p.h., the space station passes over Cape Canaveral, Fla., for just 5 min. each day. For the shuttle to catch up without wasting too much fuel, the timing has to be dead-on. STAYING IN LANE It takes 2½ days to intercept the station. The shuttle is launched into a slightly lowerorbit. Like a runner on an inside track, it catches up to the station, fires its thrusters and edges up to the station's orbit for docking...
...newly found planet has about half the mass of Saturn, but its orbit places it about 73 million miles (117 million km) from 55 Cancri, or 20 million miles (32 million km) closer to it than Earth is to the sun. That gives the planet a roughly Earthlike year of 260 days and, more important, puts it in what astronomers call the habitable zone, the distance from its sun at which liquid water can exist. The planet is too dense and gaseous to harbor life as we know it, but if it has any moons, they could be warm enough...
Rather than looking for a stellar wobble, Charbonneau and others are watching red dwarfs for signs of their light subtly dimming as an orbiting planet passes in front of them--a sort of mini-eclipse known as a transit. "If an Earth-size planet in an Earthlike orbit passes in front of a star like the sun," he says, "it dims the star by 1 part in 10,000 or even less." Since a habitable planet around an M-dwarf is much closer--about 7 million miles (11 million km) away--the transit lasts significantly longer. And since the star...