Word: orbiter
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...dared go to Mercury only once before, 30 years ago, when Mariner 10 made three flybys. Now NASA is set to try again, with a spacecraft called MESSENGER, which is scheduled to take off as early as this week on a mission to become the first probe to orbit the planet...
MESSENGER will study these and other Mercurian curiosities when it arrives at the planet in 2011. Completing a full orbit in 12 hours and swooping as close as 124 miles to the surface, it will need just six months to photograph the entire globe. After a three-decade wait for a return visit, that ought to seem like no time at all. --By Jeffrey Kluger...
Denune explains that he watched the most complex juggling sequences with a mixture of rapt attention and fear that at any moment, a ball could fall from orbit...
Iapetus, for example, is a two-toned world, its leading edge dark, its trailing edge white. There are many theories advanced for this--including the possibility that there are hemisphere-wide volcanoes or that the moon is picking up dust as it moves through its orbit, staining its face and leaving the other side clean. "We have all kinds of questions," says Cassini physicist Larry Soderblum. "Were there volcanoes? Were there oceans of some mystical hydrocarbon that froze...
...black hole, swallowing nearly $100 billion and delivering little of real value. President Bush's manned moon-Mars initiative will cost at least $170 billion--and that's from an agency that has never met a cost estimate it couldn't overrun. Forget the fixation with getting bodies in orbit or boots in the soil, critics say, and you could fairly blanket other planets with Cassini-quality landers and orbiters and still have billions left over. NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe, not surprisingly, disagrees: "Robotic missions are precursor missions." The most thorough exploration, he says, "requires the unique cognitive skills...