Word: saturn
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There is not perhaps another object in the heavens that presents us with such a variety of extraordinary phenomena as the planet Saturn...
...about objects as strange and remote as quasars, about cosmic enigmas like black holes and the faint radio noises that may be an echo of the creation, an ordinary planet, even the second largest in the sun's family, hardly seems likely to awe or surprise. Yet, remarkably, Saturn still has that power, as the Voyager 1 spacecraft so dramatically showed last November. Swooping within 78,000 miles of the luminous ringed sphere, the little robot sent back a collection of full-color images as dazzling as any ever received from deep space...
That portfolio included close-up views of the gaseous planet's stormy clouds, where equatorial winds rage at 1,100 m.p.h. It provided the first real look at the myriad small, icy worlds that are the planet's moons. But its most remarkable pictures were those of Saturn's rings. Formed out of rocky, icy fragments ranging in size from dust particles to boulders as big as apartment buildings, they totaled more than 1,000 in all. Astonishingly, some rings were twisted into what looked like braids of hair. Others contained patterns that resembled spokes...
...Planetary exploration is in shambles." Indeed, because of shuttle costs, NASA is so strapped that there is only one planetary exploration it can be sure of-and that the budget cutters cannot call off: Voyager 2, launched 3½ years ago and still speeding toward an August rendezvous with Saturn and its moons...
...shuttle could hardly have got off the pad without military support. In the early 1970s, when the space agency first sought funding for a reusable space vehicle to succeed the costly and expendable Saturn rockets that carried the Apollo astronauts to the moon, many congressional leaders strongly opposed the ambitious new space adventure. Only when the Air Force threw its full political weight behind the shuttle did Congress vote funds...