Word: orbiteer
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Once the black hole was positioned in a permanent orbit around the earth, its gravity could be tapped. From a distance of 100 yds. or so-far enough away to avoid being drawn into the black hole -an automatic firing mechanism on a spacecraft orbiting near by would aim tiny pellets of matter at it. Almost any material would do. As each pellet plunged toward the black hole, it would be squeezed and heated by the gravitational field to tremendously high temperatures, perhaps 100 million degrees...
...Lopsided Orbit. Usually obscured by the bright glare of the sun, Mercury remains almost as much a mystery as the most distant planet, Pluto. Half again as large as the moon, Mercury may be almost twice as dense. Traveling in a lopsided orbit, it comes as close to the sun as 29 million miles, then sweeps as far away as 43 million miles. To anyone standing on Mercury's surface, the sun would seem to stand still at times, then move backward briefly, in the Mercurian sky. Another oddity: Mercury's trip around the sun takes 88 earth...
Newton's laws dictate that the farther a planet is from the sun, the slower will be its speed in orbit. The planet Jupiter (fifth from the sun), for example, moves much more slowly than the earth (third from the sun). The same rules should apply to the billions of stars revolving around the central cores of distant galaxies, or to one galaxy revolving around another. In measuring the rotational velocity of the stars or galaxies, however, astronomers have discovered a perplexing fact: when the total observable mass of the galaxies is taken into account, the stars...
...tempo took its effect, and the New Haven hometowners narrowed the gap to 12 points, 46-34, with 16:38 remaining on the clock. But again, Harvard exploded into orbit, rocketing off ten in a row, led by Bill Carey's two crucial baskets, and padded the lead comfortably for the summation...
After 84 days in earth orbit, the three men were constantly reminded that readjusting to terrestrial life was not without perils and problems. Once familiar sights and sounds now seemed exceedingly strange. Though their initial dizziness soon passed, every physical effort was a chore. Pogue, who said he felt as if he weighed a thousand tons, found that it even was work to roll over in bed. When Carr rested his head in his wife's lap, he kept asking: "Is this too heavy for you?" Nonetheless, the astronauts were delighted to be home. During the ride from...