Word: orbiteer
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...looking for a world where life might thrive, a planet must be at the right temperature for water to exist in liquid form. So it needs to orbit its star in the so-called habitable zone, a "Goldilocks" location that allows a planet to be neither too hot nor too cold. In that respect, GJ 1214b is again a near miss. Its surface temperature hovers at a sweltering 190°C (374°F), which is well above the boiling point of water, at least in Earth's atmospheric pressure. Fortunately, GJ 1214b's atmosphere makes the pressure...
This expanse of high desert 35 miles southwest of Truth or Consequences, N.M., is the site of Spaceport America, a collaborative effort between the state and Richard Branson's space enterprise, Virgin Galactic, that hopes to send private citizens into near orbit as early as 2011. New Mexico is spending $198 million on construction; Virgin Galactic will lease the place for 20 years at a price of $200 million to $250 million. (See pictures of billionaire Richard Branson...
...about Konstantin Feoktistov except maybe that he wasn't a communist. Feoktistov, who died on Nov. 21 at age 83, was part of that cursed group of Soviet cosmonauts who had a troubling habit of beating the Americans to all the great milestones in space: Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth before John Glenn; Alexei Leonov walked in space before Ed White. And Feoktistov, along with two compatriots, was part of the first group spaceflight, piloting the Voskhod 1 when it rocketed into orbit on Oct. 12, 1964. America's two-man Gemini spacecraft did not launch until the following March...
...like so many of its characters, projects the novel’s style out onto its very structure; the events and characters in the novel’s five books don’t intersect so much as lie tangent to one another. Instead, they remain in orbit around the novel’s center, the Mexican border city of Santa Teresa (the fictionalized Ciudad Juárez, across the Rio Grande from San Jose, TX) where scores of women are raped and murdered every year without a major conviction...
That's not as good as the ultimate goal: to take an image of a second Earth, in an Earthlike orbit. For that, though, you really need to go into space. But the discovery of GJ 758 B is an extraordinary step, and if the project lives up to its early promise, astronomers will be learning a whole lot more about distant planets in the next few years...