Word: spacecrafts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Observatory, Whipple also discovered that meteors do not come from far-flung stars, but the Earth's solar system. He was an inventor as well. Anticipating space flight, he invented in 1946 a thin outer skin of metal known as a meteor bumper or Whipple shield, intended to protect spacecraft from high-speed particles. The device is still in use today...
...Cambridge, Massachusetts. Whipple's 1950 "dirty snowball" theory was hotly disputed by scientists who believed that comets consisted of dust or gases, but photographs of Halley's comet taken in 1986 proved him right. He also designed the "Whipple shield," a device still used today to protect spacecraft from meteors...
...debt to Batman--as well as to Seabiscuit, the Hulk and dozens of other movie projects. Or at least it will, come early September, if a helicopter stunt pilot who sharpened his skills on all those films succeeds in bringing one of NASA's most unusual--and least known--spacecraft home safely. The ship is called Genesis, the helicopter pilot is Cliff Fleming, and together they may help NASA get its best-ever chance to examine a piece of the sun itself...
...that exist today. For 27 months of its three-year mission, Genesis trolled through space beyond the orbit of the moon, gathering solar wind on five 4-in. hexagonal collector plates--each coated with silicon, gold, sapphire or diamond--and then stowing them back inside the body of the spacecraft. What's there could be a cosmic treasure: "A billion billion molecules for us to study," says Don Burnett, a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology and project scientist for the Genesis mission. But first the $260 million ship must make it home in one piece...
...returning portion of the spacecraft is about the size of a truck tire and weighs 450 lbs. When it hits the atmosphere on Sept. 8, it will be traveling at a searing 24,700 m.p.h. Even after it unfurls its parachute-like parafoil and begins coasting toward the Utah desert, it will be heading for a thudding 22m.p.h. touchdown, enough to damage the collector plates, particularly if the ship has already been dinged by micrometeorites. An ocean splashdown would cause only a marginally smaller bump and would present a further risk of water contamination...