Word: orbiter
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Marsden promptly posted Scotti's data on the Harvard Center's Website, making them available to other astronomers. In early March, those data and newer observations by two Japanese amateur astronomers and a Texas scientist were fed into the Harvard Center's number-crunching orbit predictor, which spat out the 30,000-mile "miss distance" that led Marsden to make his dramatic announcement...
...what really worries astronomers is the devil they don't know. While they estimate that perhaps as many as 2,000 asteroids larger than a kilometer (six-tenths of a mile) across either cross or come close to Earth's orbit, they have discovered and tracked fewer than 200 of them. "We simply don't know where the other objects are," says JPL astronomer Helin. "But the ones that have been discovered," she warns, "certainly suggest that we could someday face a surprise encounter with a large, unseen object." The significance of the kilometer size? An impact of anything that...
...rhythms wash and flow into each other. This, however, is not a current of water but of electricity: the album is propelled by synthesized sounds, electronic drumbeats and artificial noises. Madonna is clearly borrowing heavily from cutting-edge electronica-tinged performers, including Goldie, Bjork and Aphex Twin. William Orbit, Madonna's collaborator on the CD (he co-wrote and co-produced nearly every track) says she might release a second CD featuring the songs that were too experimental to make the album. "It would be like the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," says Orbit, who has also worked with...
...confessional nature of many of the lyrics creates a tension, even a passion. The sound of a numb Madonna trying to reconnect to her own emotions has poignancy akin to the Tin Man searching for a heart, or Spock struggling to come to terms with his human half. Orbit says that one song, the coolly funky Swim, was recorded on the day Madonna learned of Gianni Versace's murder: "I think that explains why the track has an emotional resonance to it. It was intense to record...
...Madonna's ideal realm. Her shallow pop seemed to float without foundation in her previous albums. Every time she tried to be "innovative" or "groundbreaking," it all turned into another exercise in pleasing the Top 40 crowd. The songs on Ray of Light are built around producer William Orbit's spectacular backgrounds: synthesizers illuminate the music with pseudo-stars, comets, flowing rivers, and gurgling heavenly blips. "Sky Fits Heaven," for instance, would be a dismally boring song without the lightly pulsating background that perfectly matches the song's lyrics...