Word: solarization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...danger is so great, say the critics, that Cassini must be stopped. Last week the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom ran newspaper ads calling Cassini a "nuclear experiment in space" and claiming that NASA has failed to consider safer power sources like solar cells. The group is planning rallies at the U.N., at the White House and, on Oct. 4, at Cape Canaveral in an effort to get Cassini canceled...
NASA is not amused. Snaps Wesley Huntress, the agency's chief of space science: "NASA believes this mission is safe, period. Otherwise we would not be doing it." Contrary to what the critics say, the agency did consider solar power, insists Cassini engineer Richard Stoller. Because sunlight at Saturn is only 1% as strong as it is on Earth, solar cells would not have done the trick. Neither would batteries and fuel cells; they would never last through the 11-year mission...
Question 2: My Expository Writing teacher is clearly an explorer or robotic probe from another solar system. During my last essay conference, he justified my C-plus on a paper about Mark Twain with the fact that, in Armenian, there is no word for "Slurpee." What can I do to escape...
...sparkling, in fact, gives rise to the sun's periodic magnetic storms, an activity that reaches a peak with the 11-year polar shifts. Huge pockets of gases form on the sun's surface, accompanied by sunspots, solar flares and great eruptions of gas. While this phenomenon has seemed to be limited to the sun's surface, the new probing shows that the magnetic storms are apparently stirred up by the shearing action of the winds as they press past slower moving gases, just as the eruptions of volcanoes on Earth are produced by the pressures created by motions...
...bolster its solar-observing efforts, NASA last week launched another solar satellite--this one to measure the properties of the high-energy particles ("solar wind") blowing out from the star. That was good news to many scientists who feared that, for budget reasons, the space agency might pull the plug on its existing solar observatory. "One way or another, we will keep it operating," vows NASA official George Withbroe. A good thing too, since solar storms are expected to reach another peak in the year 2000 or 2001. Stay tuned--if your power remains...