Word: soho
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Stop plucking at guitars and singing random songs to no one in particular; for crying out loud, show off. your talent to some real people. Tonight is open mic night at the posh "Back Room" at Cafe Soho's. You can sign up on the way in for an opportunity to stun the world with your musical talent. Or, if you're too damn shy, skip the sign-up sheet and recede into the dark cozy booths to eat some French fries and listen to braver souls share their tunes. 8 p.m., 11 Springfield St in Cambridge. 354-1040. Cover...
...SOHO was still close to its proper orbit, wobbling at top and bottom and rotating once a minute, too slow to have caused structural damage. Even more encouraging, the geometry of SOHO's orbit was tilting the craft's axis of rotation toward the sun by about a degree a day. That was gradually increasing the amount of sunlight hitting the solar panels. Ground controllers ordered SOHO to store that intermittent flow of energy and recharge its batteries...
...hadn't the spacecraft responded to controllers' signals before? Perhaps, suggested an ESA scientist, the probing signals were too complex for the weakened SOHO to comprehend. Early in August controllers sent a much simpler message. Result: contact! SOHO responded by transmitting its carrier signal. It was still alive and, as its batteries gradually charged, able to transmit a modicum of data...
...faces of SOHO's solar panels tilt more and more toward the sun, controllers are alternately charging the batteries and using them to warm SOHO's slushy on-board hydrazine fuel, which nearly froze during the craft's dormancy. The hydrazine, when fully thawed, will be used to fire thrusters in a series of brief burns. That procedure should halt SOHO's spin, stabilize the observatory and face its solar panels directly toward...
Only then will the SOHO team begin a two-month period of restarting and evaluating the spacecraft's systems and scientific packages in preparation for full operation in the fall. "So far we've found no damage whatsoever," says ESA's Credland. "It's incredible." Considering the odds that were stacked against the little spacecraft, incredible is probably an understatement...