Word: planet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There was, of course, no one in Mars' Ares Vallis floodplain to mark the moment when NASA's 3-ft.-tall Pathfinder spacecraft dropped into the soil of the long-dry valley. But there was a planet more than 100 million miles away filled with people who were paying heed when it landed, appropriately enough, on July 4. For the first time in 21 years, a machine shot from Earth once again stirred up the Martian dust. More important, for the first time ever, it was going to be able to keep stirring it up well after it landed. Curled...
...results are starting to show. In September the Mars Global Surveyor, already en route to the planet, will settle into orbit and begin a two-year program of photographing and mapping the terrain below. Over the next eight years, up to eight more ships will follow. As these new probes are heading Marsward, others will be dispatched to places as familiar as the moon and as remote as Pluto. "In the next 10 years," says NASA administrator Daniel Goldin, "we'll be flying by, orbiting, landing, roving and bringing back samples from every critical planetary body in the solar system...
Nonetheless, when Pathfinder actually reached the upper limits of Mars' wispy atmosphere, it would still have been possible for NASA to put the ship into the rough. The 1,256-lb. polyhedron-shaped pod was screaming toward the planet at 16,600 m.p.h., a speed that caused it to experience deceleration forces nearly 20 times as great as than Earth's gravity. In order to survive, the spaceship had to approach the planet at an angle of about 14.2[degrees]. "Go in too steep and you could crash and burn," says Pathfinder project scientist Matthew Golombek. "Go in too shallow...
...system. Water rushed into the valley at up to 170 m.p.h., carrying a giant spelunker's bag of rocks with it. Without venturing very far from where the lander set down, the rover could thus use its cameras and X-ray spectrometer to sample geology from all over the planet. Sojourner is scheduled to conduct these studies for up to a month, depending on how quickly the extreme temperatures (from -15[degrees]F by day to -125[degrees]F at night) at last claim it. The Pathfinder lander, with instruments and cameras of its own, could function for as little...
Perhaps the best thing about "Men in Black"--besides Danny Elfman's deliciously campy score--is its ending sequence, in which Earth is visually reduced to an alien's plaything. This and occassional lines from Jones referring to Earth as a little backwater planet almost smack of Douglas Adams. Too bad he didn't have a hand in writing the script...