Word: orbits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...test was designed to see how well a laser beam can remain fixed on an object in a low orbit around the earth, despite the distorting effect of the atmosphere. Such a capability is important because Star Wars planners want to station high-powered lasers on the ground, where they could be as big as necessary and easily maintained. These lasers would shoot beams up to orbiting mirrors, which would then direct the destructive light at incoming missiles...
...mirror earthward, Discovery had to fly with its nose forward and pitched downward. When it passed over the Maui facility on its 37th orbit Wednesday, the shuttle was instead flying backward with its nose pitched slightly upward. A NASA spokesman sheepishly called the mistake a "ground- based accounting error...
When an oscillator aboard the $50 million NOAA-8 weather satellite turned balky last June, the craft began tumbling out of control in its polar orbit. Without power, its systems shut down. All seemed lost, but a determined band of controllers from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), NASA and RCA refused to give up. Over the next ten months and on hundreds of occasions, they beamed radio signals at the errant craft, trying to revive...
...asteroids can wreak considerable havoc if they collide with the earth, they are of very different natures and origins. Asteroids are rocky chunks that range in size from pebbles to a mammoth named Ceres that astronomers estimate to be as much as 600 miles across. Most of them orbit the sun in a belt between Mars and Jupiter and are thought to be either remnants of a planet that disintegrated early in the life of the solar system or celestial building blocks that never quite coalesced into a planet. Occasionally an asteroid is slowed in its travels, probably...
...devising their Planet X model, Whitmire and fellow Louisiana Astrophysicist John Matese took an entirely different tack, determining the nature and orbit of a planet that would loose rains of comets at the necessary intervals. The result of their calculations: a planet with an orbital plane that slowly rotates around the sun, completing its cycle once every 56 million years. Twice during that cycle, every 28 million years, Planet X's orbit carries it through a disk of comets lying just beyond Neptune, dislodging many of them...