Word: orbits
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...coat have been punctured? There are still only theories, but here is what we do know: new temperature records reveal that the heat in the left wheel well began to increase when the shuttle was still over the Pacific, heading for California. That suggests the ship sustained damage in orbit, but began to feel the effects only when the temperature rose during re-entry. "In a large number of cases," says retired Admiral Harold Gehman, head of the investigation board, "what you find in the end has no bearing on what you thought you had in the beginning." That would...
With the foam and the bolts moving down the list of likely causes, a meteor hit moved up. Few people suggest that a cataclysmic collision simply blew the ship out of the sky--not so low in the atmosphere, anyway. But up in orbit, a bad ding by a rogue rock could have done enough damage to cause serious drag as the ship descended through the atmosphere, and Columbia indeed heeled sharply to the left before it disintegrated. Pits and gouges in the protective tiles are common during flight; ships routinely pick up close to 100 of them...
...program since Sputnik, the honor of confirming life on Mars is not expected to fall to some brash NASA spacecraft, but to a quirky British-built pod assembled by a shaggy-haired English egghead. The British space program hasn't had a leading role since James Bond went into orbit in Moonraker. But in June a small, unmanned pod named Beagle 2 (after Charles Darwin's famous ship) has a chance to change all that. Masterminded by Professor Colin Pillinger, an eccentric and exuberant planetary scientist at Britain's remote learning Open University, the Beagle is on track to beat...
...Heinz Wolff. How will the probe know if there is life on Mars? The planet's surface is a dry and frozen desert, seemingly hostile to any life-forms. But astronomers say it was once covered in rivers, lakes and possibly oceans; NASA 's Mars Odyssey satellite, currently in orbit around the planet, has detected huge quantities of ice just a few feet below the surface. Beagle will search for evidence that these areas have supported extremophiles, micro-organisms living deep underground or in extremes of heat, pressure or toxicity, that represent a kind of rock-bottom definition...
...Leonid shower occurs each November when the Earth’s orbit passes through the trail of dust left by comet Tempel-Tuttle, which swings around the sun once every 33 years. The dust grains, traveling at 158,000 miles per hour, glow and vaporize as friction heats them up in the upper atmosphere and produces streaks of light...