Word: polars
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Evidently, NASA has been leaning toward the latter. Just three weeks before Polar Lander was set to arrive at Mars, a NASA panel issued its report on the Climate Orbiter failure in September. The prime cause of that disaster, as everyone now knows, was a truly dumb mistake: the spacecraft's builder, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, provided one set of specifications in old-fashioned English units, while its operators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory were using metric...
...maybe not. With the Mars Polar Lander all but written off as a total loss, and the catastrophic failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter three months earlier, NASA is fast becoming the Dan Quayle of government agencies. Late-night comics have been roasting it mercilessly, while the Washington Post offered a Top 10 list of NASA excuses for the latest fiasco. (No. 10: Be patient. Mars Lander is trying to dial in on an AOL account.) Some cyberpranksters offered the Polar Lander for sale on eBay and got 16 bids...
Because the Polar Lander was built by Lockheed Martin as well, and because it was to use Climate Orbiter as a communications relay, the panel looked into that probe too--and found the same weak management. "A recurring theme in the board's deliberations," reads the report, "was one of 'Who's in charge?'" It also raised questions about the probe's landing technology, which was complex, risky and largely untested...
...anything, to write about. "The media, whether they realize it or not, do try to build a race," says TIME political correspondent Jay Carney. But they also had a compelling story to tell, that of two self-professed political mavericks who enchanted reporters simply by being positioned as the polar opposites of the front-runners: real, spontaneous and full of convictions, rather than cautious and poll-driven. The press was hooked, and that put the two underdogs squarely back in the race. "Free media - or as the campaigns like to call it, 'earned media' - helps cut a well-financed candidate...
...atmosphere and act like the glass walls of a greenhouse, trapping heat on the earth's surface. Scientists predict that the planet's average temperature could rise as much as 6.3[degrees]F (3.5[degrees]C) over the next century, and we are already seeing heat waves, melting polar ice and rising seas. Local impact remains unpredictable: some areas could suffer stronger storms and other places severe drought. Seven environmental groups--Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, World Resources Institute and World Wildlife Fund--have put together...