Word: planetful
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...periods of hard uncertainty after. Don Everly is 49 now, and he says, "I'd love to snip those years out of my life. Re-edit my life, rearrange it if I could, reassemble my life like a film. I'd like to put those ten years on another planet...
...data used to create the image had arrived in California by an unusual route. Looking for ways to view Halley's comet at perihelion, Ames scientists had hit upon the idea of using the Pioneer 12 spacecraft, which has been orbiting Venus since December 1978, surveying the planet with an array of instruments. Around the time of Halley's perihelion, they realized, Venus--and thus Pioneer--would be in position to have a direct view of the comet. Late in December the scientists ordered the spacecraft to pivot 90 degrees and point its ultraviolet scanner at the comet...
...towers connected by wire mesh, is more of the same, a flibbertigibbet accretion of painted waves, plywood sea creatures, banners, arches, gables, windows, lights, action. Aubry's rigid canopy of pleated gold fiber glass, topped by a big wooden fish, is baffling but unequivocally vulgar--like kitsch from another planet, or a collaboration between Claes Oldenburg and Cher. Powell's arch, with its oversize keystones, is a frolicking postmodernist fancy, circa 1980. Jahn has used the tensile imagery of naval architecture (masts, rigging, an upturned hull) to produce a fine object, jaunty but tough--a structure considerably more appealing...
...fact, some astronomers have long suspected that it was a catastrophic event, perhaps a collision with an earth-size object, that toppled Uranus on its side (see chart); it spins with its rotational axis practically perpendicular to those of most of the other planets. The spacecraft raised even more questions about Uranus when it discovered that the planet has a magnetic field about as strong as earth's but topsy-turvy by terrestrial standards, with the north magnetic pole displaced by 55 degrees from the south geographic pole. The odd arrangement led scientists to speculate that Voyager had caught...
...magnetic field also helped scientists calculate the length of a Uranian day. By detecting the changing radio emissions caused by the interaction of the field with the solar wind as the planet turns on its axis, the spacecraft established that Uranus rotates once approximately every 17 hours. The technique, explained Physicist James Warwick, can be likened to standing on a lawn and "feeling the water drops every time a sprinkler goes around." By tracking clouds in the atmosphere, Voyager discovered high-altitude winds moving around the planet at 220 m.p.h., more than twice as fast as they travel above...