Word: orbiter
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...with free spirits from the West Coast. But if the collaboration works as well in practice as it is planned on paper, the biggest winners will be the customers. Consumers will no longer have to worry about divided loyalties and incompatible programs. They won't be in Apple's orbit or IBM's, but in the best of both computer worlds...
...Shoemaker and his colleagues see it, a giant comet broke apart as it whipped around the sun. Over time, chunks of the comet separated but remained strung out in the same orbit. Then 65 million years ago, as the earth passed through the comet's orbit, it collided with the largest chunk, causing the Great Extinction. Perhaps only a year or two later, as the earth again entered the trail of cometary debris, it met a second, smaller chunk. Where did the second impact occur? This time no search is necessary. Shoemaker points to a well-known crater...
...What are the chances that much of life could once again be snuffed out by a collision with an icy comet? Rather small, but there are plenty of asteroids in the heavens capable of causing devastation. Astronomers have identified more than 130 asteroids whose paths could intersect earth's orbit. Consisting largely of rock or iron, some are over a mile wide and could ram the earth at 65,000 km (40,000 miles) per hour. The odds of a strike within the next 50 years are probably less than one in 10,000. But whenever it does happen...
...just had astronauts in orbit for an extended period. That's something you used to do. Do you miss being in space? Is it hard for you to sit on the ground and watch them...
Once upon a time, a space station seemed like a good idea. Back in 1984, when NASA first proposed to put a permanent house in orbit, it sounded like a logical next step for a nation gaining confidence in its new shuttle, flexing its space legs and preparing to go farther. After all, if we were going to send humans to Mars or back to the moon, the astronauts needed a place to assemble their giant spaceships; if we were going to monitor large-scale changes on earth, scientists needed a platform to watch from; if ultra-pure drugs...