Word: planetful
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...said, "I had a good chance at it." They were sincere, he had the qualifications, and in 1978 he joined the space program. "The true courage of space flight," he told students, * "is not sitting aboard 6 million lbs. of fire and thunder as one rockets away from this planet. True courage comes in enduring . . . persevering, the preparation and believing in oneself...
...last week provided the only bright notes during the U.S. space program's darkest hours. As the 1,800-lb. spacecraft sped away from its close encounter with Uranus, it continued its flawless performance, transmitting data and pictures that are gradually stripping away some of the mysteries of the planet. At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., nearly 2 billion miles away, William McLaughlin, the Voyager flight- engineering manager, could speak only in superlatives as he reviewed the data. Said he: "I think it is the most successful space mission of all time...
...Uranian moons and sent back incredibly detailed photographs of the five larger, previously known satellites. It had photographed the nine known rings and found at least two more. The versatile spacecraft also managed to pry a bewildering volume of information from Uranus itself, despite the fact that the giant planet is shrouded by a thick and opaque blue-green atmosphere...
Scientists at J.P.L. seemed most fascinated by Voyager's close-up views of the five major Uranian moons. By far the most exotic was Miranda, about 300 miles across and the closest of the large moons to the planet. Miranda, Geologist Laurence Soderblom explained, "is a bizarre hybrid," combining at least ten different types of terrain, some similar to the "valleys and layered deposits of Mars . . . the grooved terrain of Ganymede (a moon of Jupiter) and the depression faults of Mercury." The crusts of Miranda and three of the four other major moons, Soderblom said, "have been tectonically shuffled...
...Voyager swung behind Uranus, it bounced radio waves off the rings and discovered that they are quite different from those of Saturn, which contain an abundance of fine particles. The Uranian rings are made largely of dark "boulders," most of them more than a yard wide, that circle the planet once every eight hours. Many scientists believe they may be the remnants of a large moon that shattered in an ancient cataclysm...