Word: orbitals
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...NASA, this is exactly the image men in space should have: Ordinary guys strapping on the tool belts, doing repair work in orbit. A seven-and-a-half-hour spacewalk ended with astronauts Winston Scott and Takao Doi manually recovering a $10 million satellite that had gone spinning out of control. With the Spartan solar observer now safely in the shuttle cargo bay, astronauts are running tests to see whether the reusable satellite can go out for another 6 to 20 hours of observation before crew members retrieve it and return to Earth. NASA TV/REUTERS...
Astronomers estimate that about 2,000 objects large enough to cause a global catastrophe are hurtling on paths that either intersect or come close to Earth's orbit. Yet only 200 or so of these have thus far been identified and tracked. Just last year, a previously unknown asteroid some 1,600 ft. across was spotted four days before it whipped by Earth, missing us by only 280,000 miles--a hairbreadth by astronomical standards. Had it struck Earth, scientists say, the explosion would have been in the 3,000-to-12,000-megaton range, roughly equivalent to the explosive...
...potent example is the image of a moonlike abandoned space station which was sent into orbit before the war and whose mission humankind can no longer afford to effect. Stranded and starving to death, these astronauts become for Turnbull a modern Icarus, or maybe even the hapless architects of a new Tower of Babel. Looking into the sky, those on earth see palpable evidence of the waning power of man. These ideas are very fruitfully explored and seem the continuation of certain aspects of Brazil, and even Too Far To Go, though on a very different scale...
...Place it at the center of our solar system, and its girth ? sporting a radius somewhere between 93 and 139.5 million miles ? would engulf not only the Earth's orbit but probably Mars as well. Bye bye Pathfinder...
Because both spacecraft travel at over 17,000 miles per hour, it takes them only 90 minutes to orbit the earth. As a result, Stefanik says there is a narrow window for stationary observers to spot the spacecraft...