Word: spacecrafts
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DIED. WILLIAM PICKERING, 93, former head of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who oversaw the first launch of a U.S. spacecraft into orbit; in La Canada Flintridge, Calif. The quiet giant of the U.S. space program from 1954 to 1976, during the height of its space race with the Soviet Union, Pickering emigrated from New Zealand to study electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology...
...there had been water on Mars. It was Schiaparelli who peered through his telescope one evening in 1877 and discovered what he took to be the Red Planet's famous canals. As it turned out, the canals were an optical illusion, but as more powerful telescopes and, later, spacecraft zoomed in for closer looks, there was no shortage of clues suggesting that Mars was once awash in water. Photographs shot from orbit show vast plains that resemble ancient sea floors, steep gorges that would dwarf the Grand Canyon and sinuous surface scars that look an awful lot like dry riverbeds...
...Dream soundtrack that you downloaded last year, will perform the Boston premiere of composer Terry Riley’s Sun Rings. A joint collaboration with NASA, the performance will combine Riley’s evocative score with a series of breathtaking astral images shot by the Voyager spacecraft, to create a multi-sensory journey into space. Tickets $25-45. 4 p.m. Cutler Majestic Theatre at Emerson College, 219 Tremont St., Boston...
...Flight 158 will take off this week from Kourou in French Guiana, soaring up and away over the tiny South American country's lush equatorial forests and sandy Atlantic beaches. Flight 158 is no ordinary tourist shuttle, though. It's an Ariane-5G rocket that will launch the Rosetta spacecraft on an ambitious journey halfway across the solar system to intercept and land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is currently streaking across space at more than 100,000 km/h inside the orbit of Jupiter. "What's totally obsessing me is that we're launching into a comet and searching...
Present systems for getting from Earth's surface to low-Earth orbit are so fantastically expensive that merely launching the 1,000 tons or so of spacecraft and equipment a Mars mission would require could be accomplished only by cutting health-care benefits, education spending or other important programs--or by raising taxes. Absent some remarkable discovery, astronauts, geologists and biologists once on Mars could do little more than analyze rocks and feel awestruck beholding the sky of another world. Yet rocks can be analyzed by automated probes without risk to human life, and at a tiny fraction...