Word: solarity
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...inhabitants of earth, the third closest planet to the star, the long- awaited spectacle had begun. After a 75-year sojourn through the solar system, Halley's (rhymes with valley's) comet had again swung into view, but just barely. At Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson one night last month, several large telescopes tracked the approaching comet, projecting images that flickered across television monitors. But like countless amateur stargazers around the world, the astronomers wanted to see the cosmic celebrity with their own eyes. Huddled in the chill mountain air outside an observatory dome, necks craned, binoculars raised, they...
...Columbia's eyes will be on Halley's. One of the Astro-1 telescopes will peer at very short wavelength light to see if it can detect such elements as helium, neon and argon, which would reveal something about what temperatures were like at the time the solar system formed. If neon were detected, for example, scientists would have to lower their estimates of the temperature at which comets coalesce. A second telescope will measure the polarization of light and spectral distribution, which will provide clues on the size and shape of the comet's particles...
...city Berger descibes can be glibly dissmissed as fanciful, his point should be heeded. We must radically alter the way we live and work if we are to stop destroying the earth's natural equilibrium and start being a part of it. Self-contained apartment buildings that run on solar energy, produce food, and recycle their own wastes may not be politically or economically feasible, but they are a standard that can help us move in the right direction. Like the rest of this book, they provide a basis for criticizing current practice...
...three vehicles in the International Sun-Earth Explorer project, it was named ISEE-3 and designated to orbit a sun-earth libration point (where the gravitational pull of the sun precisely nullifies terrestrial gravity) 930,000 miles from the earth. Its mission: to study the effect of the solar wind on the earth's magnetic field. Yet even as ISEE-3 sniffed at solar breezes, its flight director, NASA Aerospace Engineer Robert Farquhar, was plotting to divert it somehow toward a comet. "The craft was custom-made to measure plasma waves," he explains, "and that's exactly what you find...
...astronauts were immediately faced with another dilemma. With its screen open, AUSSAT, which was scheduled to be deployed the next day, would probably be disabled by solar radiation while it sat unprotected in Discovery's open payload bay. The solution: AUSSAT was launched only 6 1/2 hours later, shortly before ASC1, a commercial satellite, was successfully deployed as planned, both on the first day in orbit. LEASAT 4, another orbiting link in the Navy's communications system, followed on schedule two days later...