Word: rinds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...whole, NASA has always treated Mars with respect. American spacecraft have flown by, orbited and even landed on the Red Planet. What they've never done is wound it. If scientists ever hope to understand Mars fully, however, they are going to have to puncture the dry Martian rind to sample the planetary pulp below. Next week NASA will launch a ship that will begin that process...
...gesture towards chic--Praline Parfait and Flan. The Pecan Pie is served (naturally) piping hot, graced by silky, homemade vanilla ice cream so light it was almost ice milk. It was perfect. The Key Lime Pie was typically tart and sweet, graham crackery crust with sour flecks of lime rind...
...jaws. The last step before releasing the specimen is to tag it, a job Meyer assigns to me. I take a steak knife and stab an inch-long, inch-deep incision into the shark's back--no easy task, considering that its skin is as thick as a watermelon rind and as tough as leather. The shark doesn't even flinch. "That's nothing," Meyer reassures me, "compared with the wounds they inflict on each other during mating." I slip a barb-tipped wire with a white plastic tag into the incision and tug hard to anchor it in place...
Mars is not the only place the new budget ships will visit. Last spring planetary scientists were buzzing over images returned by the Galileo space probe that provided evidence of a water ocean beneath a thin rind of ice on Jupiter's moon Europa. Where there's water, there's usually heat, and where there's water and heat, there could well be life. Sometime after 2000, NASA is hoping to launch a Europa probe that will orbit the Jovian moon at an altitude of 60 miles--about the same distance at which Apollo spacecraft used to orbit Earth...
Predictably, there is something of a pork-rind backlash. Some fans grumble that the modern speedways, charging more than $100 for the best tickets, are driving out the down-home folks who helped build NASCAR in the first place. But driver Darrell Waltrip, a three-time Winston Cup winner and a 24-year veteran of the sport, insists there is still room for all kinds of fans. "You can sit in the infields and be rowdy, or you can sit up in the stands and be a gentleman," says Waltrip. And either way, revel in the noise...