Word: planetful
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Boosting heavy chunks of metal that high is expensive, however, and Iridium and its brethren are trying to fly into space on the cheap, relatively speaking. They rely on so-called low-earth-orbit satellites that zoom just a few hundred miles above the planet's surface. They're cheaper to launch since they weigh less; and since the satellites are closer to the ground, devices with small antennas and comparatively small battery packs can reach them. Most important, signals can go up and return with no perceptible delay, which is vital for voice communications. But more of them...
...Communications and by Qualcomm, a leader in cellular technology. Its European partners include France Telecom, Daimler-Benz Aerospace and Britain's Vodafone Group. Globalstar's plan is much less expensive than that of Iridium, which has built intelligent satellites that route calls among themselves, sometimes halfway around the planet. That kind of smarts makes for a system that's more flexible but more expensive and time-consuming to debug. Globalstar is betting on a network of satellites that will act as simple repeaters with all call-setup and processing accomplished in its 60 ground stations. "If you look...
...solar system has a glamour world, Jupiter--with its brilliant colors, vast size and fruit fly-like swarm of 16 moons--has always been it. The planet appeared more elegant still in 1979, when the Voyager space probes discovered that it is circled by a fine set of nested rings...
...collision or the raw material of an incipient moon that had never had the gravitational muscle to pull itself together. Last week they reached a different conclusion. New images returned by the Galileo spacecraft reveal that the fairy-dust bands are debris blasted into space when the planet's four innermost moons were struck by meteors...
...quartet of small satellites ought to have been elusive targets for incoming debris. Orbiting so close to Jupiter, however, they lay in the path of any projectiles drawn in by the planet's gravity. When a rock hits one of the moons, it releases dust that follows the moons like smokestack exhaust...