Word: solarization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mercury ain't for sissies. Say what you will about the difficulty of sending a spacecraft to a distant place like Saturn, it's Mercury, the first rock from the sun--with its crush of solar gravity and its inferno of solar heat--that presents the greatest challenges. NASA has dared go to Mercury only once before, 30 years ago, when Mariner 10 made three flybys. Now NASA is set to try again, with a spacecraft called MESSENGER, which is scheduled to take off as early as this week on a mission to become the first probe to orbit...
...spectacular end to a 4.5-billion-year journey. Formed at the same time as the planets of our solar system, the extraterrestrial missile originally lay at the core of a small asteroid. Then, some time in its voyage through the silent vacuum of space, a chance collision with another asteroid shattered it, sending this fragment hurtling toward its meeting with Earth 300,000 years...
...While most countries except France and Finland are phasing out nuclear power, there aren't many attractive alternatives. Coal-fired electricity plants are cheap but notoriously dirty. Natural gas, although cleaner, leaves countries dependent on insecure sources of supply like northern Africa and central Asia. Renewables like windmills and solar panels are part of the solution - the number has grown exponentially in the past five years in Europe - but aren't dependable. There's an equally urgent need for investment in transmission and distribution, often the chief culprit in blackouts. Colette Lewiner, a Paris-based energy expert at consultants...
...glorious end. Space scientists can justly take pride in the ship they have built and launched. They ought to be humbled too by the enormousness of the frontier they are mapping. "We have always tended to underestimate the splendor that the solar system has to offer," says physicist Soderblum. Knowing that this may be the last time--at least in our lives--that we get such a good look at Saturn makes the wonder of what we're seeing all the sweeter. --Reported by Dan Cray/Pasadena with other bureaus
...called gaps may contain several dozen ringlets ... Saturn's entourage of other satellites, until now no more than bright gleams in earthly telescopes, also proliferated--by three--to at least 15. Chunks of ice and rock perhaps dating back to the birth of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago, these moons emerged as distinctive and different, showing scars from the millennial pounding of meteorites and possibly comets, as well as cracks from their own version of earthquakes...