Word: robotical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...portal between hotel suites that carries women who step through it either 20 years forward or 20 years back in time. This idea may seem offbeat even for a farce, but it is not surprising from a man whose nearly 50 other plays involve such tricks as a robot spouse used in a child-custody battle; audience choices that provide a script with 16 endings; and a three-story house seen on one level (with actors tiptoeing up and down -- that is, back and forth -- along imaginary stairs). "Games are fun," Ayckbourn says, his doughy face suddenly aquiver with adolescent...
Perhaps now the astronomers and other "pure" scientists will stop whining about how manned space flight is stealing all the money from real science. Why? Because last week man -- that clunky, bulky, heaving, breathing space lunk -- saved Hubble. And Hubble, the $1.6 billion orbiting telescope, is the kind of robot observer that scientists like to claim is the real way to explore space, far better than the clumsy Spam-in-a-can bipeds we periodically and extravagantly hurl into orbit. Well, now that man has done this for the robots, it is time for the robots and their human advocates...
...Goodwrenches," as Mission Control dubbed them, not only breezed through every job on their work order and a few more on the "just in case" list, but they also made it look like fun. "Piece of cake!" shouted Kathryn Thornton, perched atop the shuttle's 50-ft. robot arm as she sent a mangled solar-energy panel off into space like a falconer letting her bird take wing. "Dum dum dum dum," hummed a relaxed Tom Akers, as he and Thornton eased corrective lenses, ensconced in their 700-lb., refrigerator-size case, into position a millimeter at a time...
...week's end the mission was going flawlessly. After closing the 6,700-mile gap between the two spacecraft, Endeavour caught up with Hubble on Saturday morning. As shuttle commander Richard Covey steered his spacecraft to within 35 ft. of the telescope, astronaut Claude Nicollier used a robot arm to grab the 43-ft.-long, 25,000-lb. device and lowered it into the shuttle's cargo bay, where some repairs will be done. "Houston, Endeavour has a firm handshake with Mr. Hubble's telescope," Covey told Mission Control. "It's quite a sight." The crew also found that...
...containing Hubble's corrective lenses has to fit into an opening with less than an inch to spare -- the entire mission has + been choreographed more precisely than a Balanchine ballet. Unlike last year's rescue of Intelsat-6, in which astronauts literally grabbed the satellite when the shuttle's robot arm couldn't grasp it, the Hubble repairs require more agility than physical strength. Patience and caution are also crucial to the mission's success. Says astronaut Kathryn Thornton, who will install the planetary camera: "If you all on the ground think it's taking a long time...