Word: spacecrafts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...festival, perhaps coinciding with the winter planting, was staged to propitiate Saturn, the sickle-wielding deity of agriculture. Now scientists gathered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena may be tempted to hold their own Saturnalia. Next week, after traveling for more than three years, their robot Voyager 1 spacecraft will achieve its closest encounter with Saturn, providing the most spectacular view yet of the beautifully ringed planet and its system of moons...
...three years ago, it weighs 20 tons, has as much room as a small dacha (the amenities: a shower, 20 view ports, sleeping facilities for four), and has been occupied for 578 days, a little more than half its time aloft. The Soviets, using their new breed of Progress spacecraft-small, automated single-shot ferry ships-have repeatedly refueled and re-equipped Salyut, with a total overhaul of its inventory of more than two tons of scientific equipment...
Flashing through the heavens like an extraterrestrial Tinker Bell, the spacecraft looks like something by H.G. Wells out of Walt Disney. At the helm is none other than the boy from Brooklyn, now fully grown and, among several other things, a real astronomer. With a nonchalant gesture over his magical controls, he guides the ship on a voyage made possible only by the imagination, with the help of a Hollywood special-effects crew. Into the arms of giant galaxies he goes, through halos of stars, past a blinking pulsar, skirting the edge of a black hole, even reconnoitering a distant...
Back in 1971, the Mariner 9 spacecraft had just become the first ship from earth to orbit another planet. The target was Sagan's old favorite, Mars. In less than a year of reconnaissance, the robot accumulated more information about the Red Planet than had been gathered in three centuries of earlier observation from earth. Yet to Sagan's chagrin, the feat was virtually ignored by American television. Four years later, the even more spectacular Viking landings on Mars were again all but ignored. Sagan decided something had to be done. Joining up with an equally dismayed colleague...
...wife Linda, leaving her and their son Nicholas, 10, behind in Ithaca. He moved to Los Angeles with a New York novelist named Ann Druyan, 31, who had been collaborating with him on a record of terrestrial photographs and sounds (Murmurs of Earth) for placement aboard the Voyager spacecraft, as well as helping him with the Cosmos script. After Sagan's divorce, they hope to marry...