Word: orbits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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More than a billion miles away, just beyond Saturn's orbit, the lump of icy debris is only dimly lighted by the sun and distant stars. Even the big Palomar mirror could not have found it without a highly sensitive silicon-chip light detector called a charge-coupled device (CCD), used in place of a photographic plate. When the comet approaches for its hairpin swing around the sun in 1986, solar radiation will boil off volatile material, creating a glowing head and characteristic tail and perhaps another heavenly spectacle...
...formation. The budget-conscious U.S. has bowed out of the race to intercept Halley's comet with a robot spacecraft, thus leaving the field to the Soviets, Western Europeans and Japanese. But NASA plans a relatively cheap ($2 million) alternative: diverting an unmanned ship already in orbit for an inspection of a comet called Giacobini-Zinner, which will appear a few months ahead of its famous...
SPIRITS must be high in the Soviet Union these days. Last week marked the 25th anniversary of the launching that made Sputnik I the first man-made object to orbit Earth. In America, broad-minded thinkers like Isaac Asimov took the occasion to reflect optimistically on space exploration as mankind's first step towards a broader vision--"a view that presents Earth and humanity as a single entity." But Asimov's idealism has not infected American military leaders, who now plan to make space yet another theater of operations in the modern superpower cold...
...Pentagon scientist, who last month suggested that the station "may be the forerunner of a weapons platform." That the USSR launched 125 satellites last year while NASA sent up only 18 leads Jastrow to suspect that some of the Soviet devices are actually "killer satellites that can lurk in orbit" for long periods of time until detonated from the ground. Jastrow most fears the Soviets may someday have enough such killer satellites to abruptly declare the space above the USSR off-limits to American reconnaissance satellites. This, he says, would cripple our present ability to monitor the Soviet arms build...
...international radio frequencies for distress calls (121.5 and 243 megahertz). Though the U.S. and Canada tested such electronics on earlier American satellites, the first true U.S. SARSAT will not become operational until next February, when the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's latest Tiros weather satellite goes into orbit...