Word: solarity
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...consider a new generation of so-called superpressure balloons. Floating to the very edge of the earth's atmosphere, these gossamer giants (as tall as 60-story buildings) will remain aloft up to 100 days. That's enough time to look for such elusive phenomena as planets in other solar systems, black holes and remnants of the Big Bang. Says astrophysicist Josh Grindlay, leader of a Harvard-Smithsonian group that uses balloons to map distant X-ray sources: "For some science, they're going to give the shuttle or space station a run for the money...
With skins of an ultrathin, steely composite of polyester and polyethylene ("like sandwich bags," says Tueller), the new balloons will withstand pressures created by stratospheric solar heating and retain enough helium to circle the globe five to 10 times. The first of NASA's smaller trial balloons is to be launched in March 1999, to be followed a year later by a demonstration flight carrying a Washington University cosmic-ray detector. Over the horizon Tueller sees more astronomy and astrophysics experiments as well as Earth monitoring, such as observing the ozone hole, and perhaps even semipermanent balloons to replace some...
...with a diverse approach to solving management problems worldwide. Its founder and president, Robert Waldergreen, dropped out of Columbia University two months before graduation to start Waldergreen Associates, after the antenna which had been implanted in his skull by alien voyagers began picking up signals sent from beyond the solar system. Thousands of light years away in the star system Krion, a fleet of heavily-armed space cruisers began their slow, intergalactic march towards our sun. If these ships are traveling at 4.5 billion miles an hour, are loaded with 2 million tons of high-end proton neutralizers each...
...that velocity, says Guenter Riegler, a NASA senior scientist, a meteoroid as small as a dust particle could blast a hole nearly half an inch across in a solar panel or a layer of insulation. Equally threatening is the intense heat of impact, which would instantly vaporize the meteoroid and convert it to an ionized gas, or plasma, that would shock the spacecraft with an electrostatic charge. "If that charge got into some of your data circuitry," Riegler says, "it could wipe out data...
...threatened spacecraft to avoid short circuits and will temporarily orient each one, says Riegler, "so that its strongest side faces the incoming Leonids." Even the Hubble Space Telescope will turn its back to the meteoroids, to shield the aperture through which it scans the heavens. And the flat solar panels that energize most of the satellites will be turned edge on to the Leonid stream to minimize the possibility of impact...