Word: solarity
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...from the sun's glare in mid-February. Unfortunately for earthbound observers, it was during that unseen passage that Halley's put on its most dramatic display so far. As the comet neared its Feb. 9 perihelion, its closest approach to the sun (about 55 million miles), the searing solar rays caused increasing amounts of material to evaporate from its icy surface. Eventually the comet's enveloping gas cloud, or coma, grew to more than 12.5 million miles across, temporarily becoming the largest object in the solar system...
...Ames ever since. Says Ian Stewart, chief scientist of the Pioneer- Halley's project: "It's a gift from the gods, being in the right place at the right time." Pioneer has also determined the rate at which Halley's loses water as its icy surface is evaporated by solar radiation. Early in January, with the comet 93 million miles from the sun, the loss was about 12 tons a second. A month later, as it approached perihelion, the loss increased to 40 tons a second, and has since varied between 30 and 70 tons. Stewart estimates that the loss...
Ronald Reagan has never been a space buff, the kind of fellow who loves to talk gadgetry and hankers to go weightless. He does not know that much about the byways of the solar system. But his sense of American pride has been almost faultless. He has understood intuitively that people must have a challenge that takes them out of the despair that crowds every day. There must be a new frontier beckoning, promising some new hope. He even sees space as a way, in his words, "to render nuclear weapons obsolete." But his proposal to build and perhaps share...
...magnetic field also helped scientists calculate the length of a Uranian day. By detecting the changing radio emissions caused by the interaction of the field with the solar wind as the planet turns on its axis, the spacecraft established that Uranus rotates once approximately every 17 hours. The technique, explained Physicist James Warwick, can be likened to standing on a lawn and "feeling the water drops every time a sprinkler goes around." By tracking clouds in the atmosphere, Voyager discovered high-altitude winds moving around the planet at 220 m.p.h., more than twice as fast as they travel above...
...looked back and saw Uranus receding in the distance, Voyager seemed to be in perfect health. Scientists at J.P.L. are confident that it will stay that way not only through its encounter with Neptune in August 1989 but perhaps until 2010, when it will be far out of the solar system. Says Richard Laeser, the Voyager project manager: "I have no desire to do much else except to ride this thing all the way out into interstellar space...