Word: regulus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...future in ballistic missiles. To carry a payload as big as a nuclear warhead, the scientists argued, a ballistic missile would have to be uneconomically bulky. So the U.S. channeled its missile efforts into now-obsolescent air-breathing missiles-Snark, Navaho, Regulus, etc.-that were inherently useless for space work. Meanwhile, the Russians were pushing ahead with ballistic missiles. By 1953, when a team of U.S. physicists headed by the late Hungarian-born John von Neumann devised a way of making a thermonuclear warhead small enough to be delivered by a ballistic missile of economic size, the Russians...
...Royal Greenwich Observatory. At first, some of the pros doubted Taylor's calculations, which were published in January; the paths of two such remote bodies are very tough to calculate accurately. Only when the august Harvard College Observatory confirmed Taylor's calculations did the occultation of Regulus become a serious concern of world astronomy. The U.S. was ruled out as a major observation point because Venus and Regulus would be close to the eastern horizon with the sun above them. With help from the U.S. Air Force and Boeing Airplane Co., Harvard sent trained observers with elaborate light...
...hour of 2 p.m. universal time* approached, Venus looked like a yellow half-moon against the sky background, and Regulus, greenish in hue, was approaching the rim of its disk. The occultation was to start at 2:21. The minutes passed; the star edged closer to the invisible rim of the planet. "No change, no change," chanted Hynek into a tape recorder while an assistant read off the time. "Gosh, there-it seemed to go. It's definitely going, going. It's gone." Eleven minutes and 4.8 seconds later, Regulus reappeared from behind the bright edge of Venus...
...never larger (usually much smaller) than a golf ball seen from a distance of 500 ft. As the tiny sphere creeps slowly across the star field, it occasionally covers a faint star, but not once since the invention of the telescope 350 years ago has it covered anything like Regulus, a star of the first magnitude...
...look like much, but with careful analysis in the next few months a better picture of the Venusian atmosphere will be assembled. When the first space traveler from earth attempts to explore Venus, he will know much about what to expect, and for that he can thank winking Regulus so many trillion miles away...