Word: orbiters
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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EVERY AUGUST, COMET SWIFT-TUTTLE LEAVES A spectacular calling card. The trail of dust it sheds on its journey around the sun intersects Earth's orbit and flares into the Perseid meteor shower. The comet itself last appeared in 1862, and based on the orbit calculated at that time, it should have showed up again between 1979 and 1983. It didn...
Side by side in orbit...
Side by side in orbit...
Where does the solar system end? At Pluto, most folks would reply. Or at Neptune, the cognoscenti might say, because thanks to Pluto's odd, egg-shaped orbit, the eighth planet has been outermost since 1979 and will be through 1998. But astronomers suspect that the sun's family actually extends far beyond either of these two planets. Out there in the frigid darkness beyond any known planet, they believe, lies the Kuiper belt, a ring of dusty ice chunks that surrounds the solar system. Beyond that, astronomers say, is the similarly composed Oort cloud, which forms a vast sphere...
...double standard. Western governments may, for example, demand that to qualify for aid an ex-communist country reduce its agricultural subsidies to a level well below the largesse that the West showers on its farmers. Worse, in order to keep their countries operating, democratic leaders in the old Soviet orbit have to rely on the army of apparatchiks who ran the communist system and who naturally resist reforms that would dilute their power...