Word: robots
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wasn't until refrigerator-size boulders began hurtling down from above that the scientists sitting in an Anchorage, Alaska, control room started to get seriously worried. Until then the robot known as Dante II had successfully negotiated a steep, muddy descent and ambled unconcernedly through hot steam and poisonous gases. But even a 10-ft.-tall, 1,700-lb. automaton has its limits, and multiton chunks of rock moving at high speed were beyond Dante's. "That big one," said Carnegie Mellon University robotics expert John Bares, pointing nervously at a video screen after a rockslide, "would've wiped...
...misstep, not a rock, that toppled Dante, and only after the robot had completed its main mission: a detailed study of the crater floor 300 ft. below the rim of Alaska's active Mount Spurr volcano that included a 3-D survey of the hellish terrain and an analysis of gases issuing from belching vents. Among the significant results: the first maps of the crater's surface, normally hidden by outcroppings and haze. Dante also discovered scant sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide in the noxious air, implying that the volcano, which erupted in 1992, will probably stay quiet...
Last month ESA's science director, Roger Bonnet, unveiled a bold proposal: an open-ended program to colonize the moon. The program could begin as early as the year 2000 with exploration by robot orbiters and landers, followed by installation of automated scientific instruments. Finally, robots would build a base, which could be ready for human occupation in 2020, says Bonnet. A similar proposal has come from Japan, where a group called the Lunar and Planetary Society set out its own ideas for a robot-made moon base that could be built by 2024 for $28 billion. Both plans contain...
...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...
...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...