Word: spacecrafts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Fish chronicles the return of the shy, self-effacing Dent to his home planet after a successful demolition-eve escape. He has spent the intervening eight years hitching rides on passing spacecraft, snacking at duty-free shops on distant planets and encountering such diverse creatures as a lost tribe of ballpoint pens mislaid by former owners, and a race of marketing executives who, despite 573 committee meetings, have still not discovered the wheel ("All right, Mr. Wiseguy . . . you tell us what color it should be"). To Dent's surprise, earth has somehow escaped destruction, but all the dol phins have...
...feeble light of the distant sun, Voyager 2 hurtled toward Uranus last week, rapidly accelerating under the gravitational pull of the huge gaseous body. Aboard the spacecraft, two television cameras and an array of instruments focused on the ever enlarging sphere and its rings and moons, snapping pictures and taking readings that were beamed to earth, almost 2 billion miles away. At week's end, as Voyager whipped past the mysterious blue-green planet, soaring as close as 50,679 miles to its cloudtops at 42,143 m.p.h., streams of new data from the craft poured into the control room...
Stone was not exaggerating. Within a few days, Voyager had taught scientists more about Uranus than they had learned in the entire 205 years since it was discovered by Amateur Astronomer William Herschel. The spacecraft detected a tenth ring and ten tiny, previously undiscovered moons and discerned craters and other surface features on the five large moons that until now had been seen only as featureless spots of light through telescopes. It observed a reddish-brown haze at the planet's north pole and tracked cloud formations as they passed over the middle latitudes. The movement of the clouds seemed...
...fact that any pictures and information reached J.P.L. from Uranus is remarkable in itself. Signals from Voyager's transmitter, traveling at the speed of light, required 2 hours and 45 minutes to traverse the 1.84 billion miles between the spacecraft and the earth, and were incredibly faint when they arrived. To enhance the transmissions, nasa picked them up with antennas at all three of its Deep Space Network complexes in California, Australia and Spain, and combined them electronically. Still, the combined signals were so weak that NASA engineers had to slow down the transmission rate so that information could...
...back at the planet, now silhouetted against the distant sun, seeking to learn more about the rings by observing sunlight passing through them. One early finding: the rings contained far less dust than those circling Saturn. Then, its direction changed by the tug of Uranian gravity, the hardy little spacecraft began a 3 1/2-year trip to Neptune, which it is scheduled to encounter in August...