Word: spacecrafts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...marijuana, PCP, heroin and numerous other drugs while they worked. Frankel estimates that 20% to 25% of the Rockwell workers at the Palmdale, Calif., plant, the final assembly point for the four space shuttles, were high on the job from drugs, alcohol or both. During the construction of the spacecraft, police raided Rockwell's shuttle assembly plant in Downey, Calif., several times after undercover agents bought cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines and marijuana from employees. Nine workers were fired...
...This is the first time we've gone to the comet," said Carl Sagan. The Cornell University astronomer was one of about 100 foreign scientists who gathered at Moscow's Institute of Space Research to observe the eagerly awaited rendezvous of the Soviet spacecraft Vega 1 with Halley's comet. At 2:30 a.m. (EST) on March 6, as Vega passed within 5,300 miles of Halley's nucleus and as images of the legendary comet flashed on television screens at the institute, Sagan joined the other foreign scientists in applause, while Soviet scientists and technicians hugged and kissed...
...Soviets were justifiably proud. Their spacecraft -- designed, built and equipped under their supervision by scientists from ten nations -- had become the first man-made object to record close-up views of a comet's coma and nucleus, and send the images and other data back to earth.* It also served as the advance guard for four other craft -- the Soviet Vega 2, the Japanese Suisei and Sakigake, and the European Space Agency's Giotto -- that were to sweep by Halley's in the following week...
Vega 1's camerawork was a triumph of technology. While whipping by Halley's at a speed of 175,000 m.p.h. (relative to the comet), the spacecraft's TV cameras shot some 500 pictures in about three hours. Transmitted across 109 million miles of space, each picture took nine minutes to arrive in Moscow, where it was colored by computer to emphasize differences in brightness. The first images showed only the coma, the great cloud of gas and dust surrounding the nucleus, as a fuzzy, violet-fringed, blue-green ball with a yellow center. But in images that Vega...
Early evaluation of data from Vega 1 showed that the craft encountered less dust than expected as it approached the comet. But Physicist John Simpson of the University of Chicago, who designed the only American instrument -- a dust detector -- aboard Vega, noted that as the spacecraft departed, it passed through a "huge spike of dust" with particles about the size of those in cigarette smoke. Simpson and other scientists interpreted the spike as a burst of dust and gas erupting from the surface of the nucleus. Other Vega instruments seemed to show that the icy cometary surface was being evaporated...