Word: solarity
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...degrees F and drove 55 m.p.h. instead of 70 m.p.h. Meanwhile, rising prices made it economical for utility companies to convert to coal-fired and nuclear-powered plants and for other businesses to install new energy-efficient equipment. Some homeowners even began heating their houses and pools with solar panels. Result: the U.S. reduced its reliance on oil imports from 8.6 million bbl. per day in 1977 to 4.3 million bbl. last year. Even better, much of that supply came from such newly expanded sources as Mexico and Britain rather than the volatile Persian Gulf countries...
...bust has spoiled the economics of alternative energy sources as well. Many of the ballyhooed 1970s-era programs to extract petroleum from oil shale and tar sands have been mothballed because they cost too much to operate. The hundreds of mom-and-pop solar-power companies that sprang up in the past decade have mostly folded, even in the Sunbelt. Says Susan deWitt, executive director for the California Solar Energy Industries Association: "Our customers no longer feel the urgency to pursue renewable energy." The U.S. is not alone in that regard. Brazil's innovative alcohol-fuel program will...
...spike of dust" with particles about the size of those in cigarette smoke. Simpson and other scientists interpreted the spike as a burst of dust and gas erupting from the surface of the nucleus. Other Vega instruments seemed to show that the icy cometary surface was being evaporated by solar radiation at a rate two to three times as fast as scientists had predicted...
...nucleus, shooting close-up pictures as it passed. Precision pathfinding was less important for the Japanese craft. Suisei, designed to study the huge hydrogen gas cloud surrounding Halley's, was targeted to fly by the comet at a distance of almost 100,000 miles. Sakigake, studying the solar wind so that scientists can determine the wind's effect on the comet's tail, would not come closer than 4.4 million miles from the nucleus...
...week's end scientists were worried about Giotto's chances. As they continued to interpret Vega 1's data, they discovered that its passage through the dust jet had damaged 45% of the craft's solar panels. During Giotto's much closer encounter with the comet, the European probe was bound to pass through far thicker clouds of dust on what some scientists characterized as a "kamikaze mission...