Word: spacecrafts
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...fact that compressed gas heats up, which limits how dense it can become, and in turn limits how hard its gravity can pull on the proto-planets. Beyond that, the planets' own gravity would fling gas around - the same sort of phenomenon NASA counts on, say, when a spacecraft en route to Saturn gets a slingshot velocity boost from Jupiter on the way. By adding in both effects, Mac Low's collaborator Sijme-Jan Paardekooper, now at Cambridge, found that there are places where the net force pushes a planet inward, but other places where it pushes outward...
...space: Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth before John Glenn; Alexei Leonov walked in space before Ed White. And Feoktistov, along with two compatriots, was part of the first group spaceflight, piloting the Voskhod 1 when it rocketed into orbit on Oct. 12, 1964. America's two-man Gemini spacecraft did not launch until the following March...
Feoktistov was different from other Soviet flyboys. For one thing, he was an egghead, a prominent spacecraft designer who also had the guts to fly the technology he helped develop. For another, he snubbed the Communist Party--professional suicide in the U.S.S.R. "I had many enemies who did not want me to make that flight," he famously told the Boston Globe in a 1998 interview. "Once we took off, I remember thinking, That's it. No one can get me off this spaceship...
...Supporters of the program argued that a lunar mission would provide untold technological spin-offs. Many of those same enthusiasts now say they have been vindicated. Operating a satellite at a distance ten times beyond anything they had done before has given the ISRO valuable experience in hi-tech spacecraft, rocketry and advanced remote navigation technology. At $79 million, the program's budget also comes in way under those by many competitors...
Even viewed from Earth, the 310-mile-diameter moon appears bright white, almost as if covered in ice or snow; when the Voyager 1 spacecraft arrived at Saturn in 1981, it confirmed that long-distance impression. More intriguing was the way Enceladus behaved. Embedded inside Saturn's E ring - the outermost of the eight bands that make up the ring system - Enceladus seemed to orbit with a thick clump of ring matter trailing behind it, almost as if it were dragging the material in its gravitational wake. What astronomers suspected instead - and what Voyager confirmed - was that Enceladus...