Word: planetful
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...YORK CITY—“I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation. Between us and everyone else on this planet. The president of the United States. A gondolier in Venice. Fill in the names...
...bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people. It’s a profound thought,” Guare wrote. Call it what you will—profundity or intense East Coast/Ivy League social networking. But it’s something to think about...
Cassini will use an elaborate suite of instruments to determine why all this meteorological hubbub is taking place on a planet that is so cold--with cloudtop temperatures of --218F--that it shouldn't be able to cook up much weather. The best guess is that internal heat left over from the gravitational collapse that formed the planet in the first place is keeping things warm. Cassini will deploy its cameras, infrared sensors, chemical spectrographs and more to deconstruct the planet's atmosphere and find out for sure. Other instruments will map the planet's magnetosphere and gravitational...
...sure how the rings formed, some of the material is almost certainly the remains of small pulverized moons that were destroyed either by a cataclysmic meteor hit or when they wandered too close to a gravitational danger zone known as the Roche limit: the altitude above a planet at which the difference in gravity between the end of an object closest to the planet and the end farthest from the planet is great enough to pull the object apart while not pulling the remains out of orbit. Instead, the rubble disperses around the planet. Photographs of the debris could help...
...Cassini-Huygens traveled all the way to Saturn and returned nothing but data on the planet and its rings, the mission would probably still be judged a success. Yet the true scientific goods will come when the spacecraft trains its instruments on the swirl of Saturnian moons. It would be nearly impossible for one ship to visit all 31 known satellites in Saturn's litter, so NASA has selected nine of them, both for their scientific promise and their comparatively convenient locations. The exotic names of the chosen moons--Phoebe, Titan, Iapetus, Enceladus, Mimas, Tethys, Hyperion, Dione and Rhea--hint...