Word: skies
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...January of 1978, the Soviet spy satellite Cosmos 954 dropped out of orbit and fell to earth. It did not completely disintegrate in the atmosphere. Instead, debris from the satellite fell across almost 40,000 square miles of northwest Canada. Metal from the sky is frightening enough, but this metal was radioactive...
...jittery air travelers, the news was decidedly mixed. No, the jumbo jet had not suddenly disintegrated in midair from metal fatigue. But, yes, there are people out there who are capable of planting bombs aboard passenger planes to blast them -- and hundreds of innocents -- out of the sky. When Britain's Department of Transport announced last week that investigators had found "conclusive evidence of a detonating high explosive" that shattered Pan Am Flight 103 at 31,000 ft. above Scotland, killing some 270 people, two questions took on a grim priority...
...metal earth on a coat hanger in the middle of a melon-size clear-plastic sphere that is supposed to be the universe. The students then use Magic Markers to trace onto the universe a computer-drawn map of a few hundred of the brightest stars in the night sky. They draw a line around the sphere to represent the ecliptic, or path of the sun through the constellations, and then they are ready for some gnarly astronomy...
...graduation day to explain why there are seasons. All blithely described how the earth is closer to the sun in summer and farther away in winter. Wrong. The seasons result from the tilt of the earth's axis relative to its orbit. When the sun is highest in the sky, we have summer. In fact, the earth is closest to the sun in January...
...science. Thus students may master the inverse-square law of physics by seeing that when a star doubles its distance from a certain point, it becomes one-quarter as bright. Why choose astronomy for this purpose? "It's not as abstract as chemistry and physics," says Shapiro, "and the sky is always there...