Word: orbiter
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...That is, if the earth were to be hit by a newly spotted asteroid called 2002 NT7. The chance of the 2-km-wide rock scoring a bull's-eye lengthened from 1 in 60,000 to 1 in 75,000 as astronomers continually recalculated its orbit. If the lump of space rock did hit the earth it could wipe out a continent, throw up dustclouds that would block sunlight for months and quickly take humankind to the brink of extinction. So plan accordingly. RUSSIA Lost Young Men The Helsinki Federation, an international human-rights organization, accused the Russian military...
...TIME senior writer Michael Lemonick is currently writing "Echo of the Big Bang" for Princeton University. "The essence of the book is that there is a satellite currently in orbit that's measuring left-over radiation from the Big Bang, and looking at it with much greater precision than anyone has ever done before," says Lemonick. "This satellite is going to report its findings in January, and it's either going to confirm existing ideas about how the Big Bang happened, or throw 20 years of assumptions and research out the window. We're hoping for the latter, because that...
...best picture the world has ever seen wasn't snapped by a professional photographer but by a man of science, the former U.S. astronaut William Anders. Taken in December 1968 from Apollo 8 - the first manned vehicle in lunar orbit - the image is of the earth rising above the moon's arid, lifeless horizon. Revealing the planet for the first time as a pristine blue and white jewel in the black void of space, the picture became an instant classic, inspiring poets and becoming a symbol of the ecology movement. "It is truly the most beautiful photo ever taken," says...
...star that's causing all the buzz is 55 Cancri, about the size and age of our sun, located just 41 light-years away. This is not the first time a planet has been seen orbiting the star. In 1996 Geoffrey Marcy, a professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and astrophysicist Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington spotted a different Jupiter-size world circling 55 Cancri in a close-up orbit just 10 million miles from the solar fires--closer than little Mercury orbits our own sun. All told, astronomers have found about...
...world revealed by Marcy, Butler and their team last week, however--yet another around 55 Cancri--is an entirely different beast. About 3.5 to 5 times the mass of Jupiter--close enough by planetary standards to be a sister--it orbits at a distance of 510 million miles, remarkably like Jupiter's 480 million. The new world takes 13 years to complete a single orbit; Jupiter takes almost 12--again, all but identical...