Word: shippings
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...what may be the feeblest spacecraft they've ever built--and they couldn't be prouder of it. Never mind the decades of unmanned probes that have gone roaring into the void at tens of thousands of miles per hour, fire streaming from their tails. The new ship will putt-putt into interplanetary space under the power--if that's even the word--of an engine that accelerates by barely 15 m.p.h. (24 km/h) per day, or zero to 60 in more than half a week. Yet the places the ship is going--and the remarkable way it will...
...belt of rubble that circles the sun between Mars and Venus. NASA vehicles have been this way before, but they've usually been just passing through on their way to the planets in the outer solar system. This time the asteroid belt itself will be the destination, and the ship will get there courtesy of the young technology of ion propulsion...
...that whole mess. Rather than rely on common combustible fuel, it uses xenon gas, a comparatively light 937 lbs. (425 kg) of it loaded into a compact 72-gal. (273 L) tank. A jolt of electricity energizes the gas, causing xenon ions to shoot out the back of the ship at 77,000 m.p.h. (124,000 km/h). A stream of charged atoms has somewhat less oomph than a burst of fire--less force than the weight of a single piece of paper, in fact--but over time it adds up. "It's acceleration with patience," says Rayman. "In the four...
...OCEANOGRAPHY 29,000 Number of rubber ducks expected to wash up on beaches in Cornwall, England, late this summer. The ducks, which fell off a cargo ship in 1992 and have since floated 27,400 km, are being studied by scientists investigating ocean currents $1,000 Amount some collectors are expected to pay for the well-traveled bathtub toys...
...targeting the European market: geography. Europe is thousands of kilometers from Colombia, Bolivia and Peru - home to the world's entire crop of coca leaves, from which the white powder of cocaine is refined. And Europe's sophisticated airport security systems and coastal patrols have made it tough to ship massive volumes of cocaine undetected. That means the cartels need transit points where they can store the huge amounts of the drug that they have moved across the Atlantic. It can then be divided among hundreds of smugglers who can individually sneak it into Europe - and who are desperate enough...