Word: planetful
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...space, there was no faulting Voyager 2's marksmanship. Indeed, one golf-minded scientist likened it to sinking a 500-mile putt. Superlatives were certainly in order last week as the semiautonomous robot completed the second lap of its epic flight: a rendezvous with the giant ringed planet Saturn, the spectacular finale to two ambitious decades of planetary exploration by unmanned U.S. spacecraft...
Racing toward Saturn at 54,000 m.p.h.-20 times as fast as a speeding bullet-the 1,800-lb. spacecraft came within a cosmic hair of the planet's stormy cloud tops, clearing them by 63,000 miles. Then it plunged downward behind the huge gaseous sphere and passed through a large gap near the edge of the thin disc of icy debris that forms Saturn's multi-hued rings. Finally, like a pebble in a great celestial slingshot, it was sent hurtling off toward Uranus on a new course created by the powerful pull of Saturn...
...sudden failure, Voyager 2's performance was almost flawless. Picking up where its twin, Voyager 1, left off last November, it provided new insights into Saturn's turbulent weather. Banded with powerful jet streams, like those of neighboring Jupiter (which Voyager 2 surveyed in 1979), the planet has even greater winds-up to 1,100 m.p.h. just north of the equator. In Saturn's higher latitudes, Voyager 2's cameras spotted a storm system larger than all of Europe and Asia, as well as numerous smaller storms, some whirling clockwise, others counterclockwise...
...makeup was heavy, they enjoyed great prestige on studio back lots, but in the '60s, when movie stars were suddenly supposed to look like real people, warts and all, the makeup man went into a decline. A revival-the beginning of the Golden Age of Makeup-began with Planet of the Apes (1968), and The Exorcist (1973) and scores of films featuring a graphic spilling of blood and guts. In Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, some 20 years ago, a knife was never seen touching the victim, played by Janet Leigh. "Now, they want it to cut right through...
Still another experiment involves Voyager 2's photopolarimeter, a light-measuring device that failed on the first flight.. As the spacecraft approaches the planet, the instrument will be aimed through the rings at Delta Scorpii, a far-off star. By measuring disruptions (or blinking) of the starlight caused by the intervening ring material, the scientists should get the most precise data yet on the number of rings, their density and width and the size of the stuff they are made...