Word: orbitals
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This amateur network has run down most of the satellites--spy or commercial--that have ever been launched and are still in orbit, including what appeared to be a stealth satellite the U.S. deployed in 1990. All this info has been channeled to a website playfully called Heavens-Above.com that shows where the orbital snoops are every hour of the day or night--something that has some in U.S. intelligence circles understandably livid...
...takes patience to spot the fleeting satellites skimming across the night sky plus a certain skill at celestial mechanics to divine an orbit from these observations. But Molczan and his Web cronies have become highly proficient. Russell Eberst of Edinburgh, Scotland, has made some 170,000 orbital observations over a storied career. Mike McCants of Austin, Texas, has spent hours on end scanning the sky for lost satellites. Especially gifted is Jonathan McDowell, a researcher at the Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astro-physics who can process orbital data like a super-computer...
Molczan insists that spying on the spies isn't really hard. For starters, he says, the U.S. telegraphs its intentions by warning mariners and aviators before every space launch. Using spherical trigonometry, the trackers plot a potential orbit and notify other amateurs worldwide where to look. That's how Eberst and others track the famous 1990 stealth satellite, despite decoys deployed to distract observers. They lost that satellite after it maneuvered unexpectedly a few months later, but even that much tracking has some spooks steamed...
...need to cash in your IRA quite yet. For one thing, today doesn't have the closest alignment of planets in 6,000 years; in fact, the alignment has often been closer, very much so in 1861. For another, the changing distance of the moon in its monthly orbit has many times the gravitational effect on the earth of all of the planets combined. One would thus expect this kind of "polar shift" several times a week...
...both ways at 99.995% the speed of light. When you return, the earth will be 1,000 years older, but you'll have aged only 10 years. I already know a time traveler. My friend, astronaut Story Musgrave, who helped repair the Hubble Space Telescope, spent 53.4 days in orbit. He is thus more than a millisecond younger than he would have been if he had stayed home. The effect is small, because he traveled very slowly relative to the speed of light, but it's real...