Word: solarization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...probes are heading Marsward, others will be dispatched to places as familiar as the moon and as remote as Pluto. "In the next 10 years," says NASA administrator Daniel Goldin, "we'll be flying by, orbiting, landing, roving and bringing back samples from every critical planetary body in the solar system." In the wake of Friday's landing, it's hard not to believe...
Preliminary readings from the ship indicated that landing conditions were well within what the engineers had expected. Pathfinder was tilted at an angle of less than 3[degrees], plenty flat enough to allow the rover to disembark. The solar arrays were being bathed by sun and were producing all the power the spacecraft needed. That same sun, however, was providing little heat: the temperature at Ares Vallis was a crisp -64[degrees]F. But Pathfinder, built to function in that kind of killing cold, seemed unaffected. "I'm ecstatic," said flight systems manager Brian Muirhead as the stream of healthy...
Though Sojourner won't get anywhere fast, where it does go should hold a lot of secrets. Ares Vallis was chosen as the landing site in the first place because the now dusty basin was once the largest known floodplain in the solar system. Water rushed into the valley at up to 170 m.p.h., carrying a giant spelunker's bag of rocks with it. Without venturing very far from where the lander set down, the rover could thus use its cameras and X-ray spectrometer to sample geology from all over the planet. Sojourner is scheduled to conduct these studies...
...Comet Wild 2 in 2004 and fly back home with a bit of material from its diaphanous tail; and perhaps even a much-dreamed-of journey to Neptune's planet-size moon Triton. Says Goldin: "We're going to have the most aggressive exploration of our own solar system in the history of the human species...
Imagination was abetted by science. If life could evolve on little old Earth, why not on another planet in the same solar system, one that was a mere seven-months' flight away? Mars had a warm, dense atmosphere, water, floodplains. Last August brought news of a meteorite, most likely from Mars, containing minerals and other evidence of a long-past microbial life; a thrill was felt around the world...