Word: sagan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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NASA has appointed a kind of outer-space swat team to figure out how to make up for the scientific gap left by the loss of Mars Observer. The team, which includes all-around space guy Carl Sagan, will look into whether cheaper, less complex space probes can map Mars and whether foreign nations should be invited to take part. A report is due in two months...
Even before Sagan & Co. make their report, the U.S. and Russia, spurred on by President Clinton, have finally done what the experts have urged for years: agreed to massive cooperation in space. The Russians will be permitted to launch U.S. satellites; the U.S. will pay hundreds of millions of dollars to put experiments aboard the Russian space station Mir, where they will be tended by American astronauts; and the U.S. will bring Russia on as a full partner in its own space-station effort...
Gorbachev's prestige has helped attract Green Cross board members such as Javier Perez de Cuellar, former Secretary-General of the U.N., and former Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu. Other trustees range from astronomer Carl Sagan to Rene Felber, the former President of Switzerland. Ultimately, Gorbachev envisions a network of local, national, regional and international offices that will, as he puts it, "enhance and amplify" the work of other environmental groups. He also sees this network as a means of changing the "values" of human societies...
...Kuwait, which was widely reported to be the largest in history -- some 11 million bbl. -- is now estimated to be one- quarter to one-twentieth that size, making it smaller than the 1979-80 Gulf of Mexico spill at the offshore drilling rig known as Ixtoc I. Similarly, Carl Sagan's well-publicized prediction that smoke from the oil fires could rise 5 to 10 km (3 to 6 miles) to the stratosphere and blanket the globe has not yet come to pass. So far, the smoke clouds are hugging the ground, drifting in the prevailing westerlies only...
There is not much support, however, for the contention of a few scientists, including the astronomer Carl Sagan and Abdullah Toukan, science adviser to Jordan's King Hussein, that oil-field fires could bring on a nuclear winter, affecting weather patterns all around the world with devastating effects on agriculture. Nuclear blasts and volcanoes can send smoke exploding 16 km or more into the upper atmosphere, enabling it to travel long distances around the globe; but the worst oil-field inferno would probably lack the upward thrust to send smoke even one-tenth as high into the air before...