Word: spacecrafts
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Theoretical astrophysicists don't usually get involved in the nitty-gritty of spacecraft design, but Spergel is not your typical theorist. Even in a field in which the most brilliant minds are inevitably compared with Albert Einstein, Spergel stands out. Beginning as an undergraduate at Princeton in the early 1980s, he has navigated from one knotty problem to another--not as a dilettante academic dabbling at the edges but as a key player making important contributions at every turn...
...that display of intellectual honesty, Spergel suspects, that earned him an invitation to work on the microwave satellite. And once having tasted the pleasures of actual rocket science, he could hardly resist an invitation to help design a second spacecraft. The goal of this new mission is to find Earthlike planets orbiting other stars, and it requires solving optical problems that astronomers have never before confronted...
...only exit strategy. Donald Korycansky of the University of California at Santa Cruz and his collaborators suggest that Earth could be edged out of harm's way with a gravitational slingshot, a trick long used to boost the speed of planetary probes. Earth would be the spacecraft, grabbing orbital energy from a passing asteroid. That would increase Earth's speed and enlarge its orbit. Repeated every few thousand years, Korycansky & Co. reckon, such flybys could stretch Earth's habitable lifetime by billions of years...
...also very nearly became the first visitor to reach an orbiting spacecraft and get told he wasn't welcome aboard. NASA, along with its Japanese, Canadian and European partners in the space-station project, made it clear it didn't want Tito to fly, claiming he would be in the way of the real spacemen, who will be working on the still unfinished orbital complex--installing a brand-new Canadian-built robot arm, for example, that just went up on the shuttle...
...capsule. His one-orbit, 108-minute flight made him the first man to travel in space and marked one of the most important events of the 20th century. Twenty years later, also on Apr. 12, the space shuttle Columbia entered space. The 54-hour maiden voyage of the reusable spacecraft signified the dawning of a new age of exploration...