Word: spacecraft
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...friction escalates between Washington and Moscow, the U.S. could find itself shut out of the International Space Station. After it retires the space shuttle in 2010, NASA will be dependent on Russian spacecraft until...
...Zimmerman said that among the researchers at the observatory there was no fear or politics associated with the Russian spacecraft...
...word of it must then travel to Earth across the vast ocean of the cosmos. The dispatch may move at the speed of light, but the journey can still take hours, years, epochs--turning current events into history long before we ever learn of them. Signals from the Cassini spacecraft, currently studying Saturn's moons, take 84 min. to reach us; the supernova whose cataclysmic birth astronomers observed earlier this year was already fading millions of years...
Never was the oddly ex post facto quality of celestial news more surreally on display than on May 25, when the Phoenix spacecraft touched down on Mars, the first landing ever in the Red Planet's polar region. In order to arrive at its destination in one piece, Phoenix had to cap its sleepy 10-month journey with a fiery 7-min. plunge through the atmosphere, during which it opened its parachutes, jettisoned its heat shield, fired its engines and decelerated from a blistering 12,700 m.p.h. (20,400 km/h) to a toe-in-the-dust touchdown speed...
...spacecraft now has about three months to study the Martian north pole before -200 F winter temperatures hit the region and threaten to freeze the instruments. But Phoenix is designed with a longer, six-to-eight-month stay in mind, so hopes are high that the probe will not only find frozen water but will also serve as a precursor to later missions seeking evidence of microscopic organic life. Which means that NASA, like Frosty, will probably be back again someday...