Word: spacecrafts
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...funny thing happened on the way to Halley's comet last week. As an armada of Soviet, Japanese and European space probes hurtled through the cosmos toward their heralded meetings with the fabled comet next March, they were upstaged by a modest and almost archaic Ameri can spacecraft. The International Cometary Explorer whipped through the tail of an obscure apparition called Giacobini-Zinner, thereby becoming the first man-made object to encounter a comet...
...fact an old space hand, having already logged more than 30 million miles before its billion-mile cometary odyssey. Measuring 5 ft. tall and 5 1/2 ft. in diameter, the drum-shaped spacecraft was launched on Aug. 12, 1978; as one of three vehicles in the International Sun-Earth Explorer project, it was named ISEE-3 and designated to orbit a sun-earth libration point (where the gravitational pull of the sun precisely nullifies terrestrial gravity) 930,000 miles from the earth. Its mission: to study the effect of the solar wind on the earth's magnetic field. Yet even...
...model, which stipulated the continual creation of matter (a concept now completely out of favor). In 1968 Gold was the first to propose that pulsars were rapidly rotating neutron stars (all evidence suggests he was right). In the mid-1960s he sparked another ruckus by predicting that the first spacecraft to land on the moon could encounter a mile-thick layer of dust that, if loose, would engulf the vehicle (the lunar surface, of course, was perfectly firm...
...left side of the space shuttle Discovery, which was speeding above the Hawaiian island at 17,500 m.p.h. The intention was to bounce the low-powered ribbon of light off the mirror and send it flashing back to Maui. But as the blue-green laser beam successfully "painted" the spacecraft over the test site, no reflection bounced back. Mission Commander Daniel Brandenstein stated the obvious: "We're not pointing at the ground...
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...