Word: orbitals
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Before the orbiter attempts that maneuver, it will execute two flybys of the moon Titan, whose opaque orange atmosphere has been increasingly pierced by the spacecraft's radar. And this summer Cassini will make an unusually high orbit above Saturn's massive B ring, promising unique images of the ring, spread like an immense halo around the planet. The ship will also have the rare opportunity to observe the sun cross the plane of the ring from south to north, literally shedding light on the B ring's complex particle structure. "We want to know what a particle would look...
Scientists hope that clearer data will reveal information about why the geysers formed. The leading theory is that Saturn's gravitational pull puts stresses on the moon, causing the fissures from which the plumes erupt. "Enceladus' orbit around Saturn is eccentric," Mitchell says. It's just enough off of circular that the effect of gravity on the moon is different from one point to another, and different from the planet's other moons. "That difference in the tug would be enough to cause the body to distort differently as it goes around Saturn." The friction created when sides...
...Another after-effect of Kosovo's independence is Moscow's rallying of its hitherto reluctant CIS partners against the West. Oil-rich Azerbaijan, for example, had long begun inclining towards the West, but may be pushed back into Moscow's orbit because of Nagorno-Karabakh, a province that broke away in the 1990s and has de facto integrated with Armenia. Last week, for the first time in years, Azeri and Armenian forces clashed in a full scale fighting in Karabakh...
...Even a staunchly pro-Western Georgia, furious as it is with Russia, might finally be forced back into Russia's orbit because of Kosovo. "It's indeed surrealistic," quips Japaridze darkly: "How it happens that in terms of the 'Kosovo Precedent' we, Georgians, Azerbaijani, Moldovans, have to support Russia's position and go against the West...
...Culture novels (there are eight of them) are about the challenges of a world in which thinking beings must deal with one another across vertiginous gulfs of cultural and technological difference--a world, in other words, both completely different from and identical to our own. In Matter (Orbit; 593 pages), Banks' first Culture novel since Look to Windward, one of those technological gulfs opens up within a family: Djan Seriy is born into a royal clan on a backwater planet, but she is recruited into the Culture. Her brother Ferbin remains behind on their primitive home world. (Which is, incidentally...