Word: spacecrafts
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Students made their way up to the tenth floor of the Science Center for the chance to catch a glimpse of the spacecraft, which appeared as a fast moving, relatively bright, star-like object...
Think you could stare at a single spot without blinking for 3½ years? Then be glad you're not NASA's Kepler telescope, which is set to blast into space from Cape Canaveral, Fla., this Friday night. Kepler's job may sound boring to you, but what the spacecraft accomplishes could be extraordinary: the discovery of the first Earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars. Those kinds of places might well be brewing Earth-like forms of life...
...Still, to make any real discoveries, Kepler will have to look at a lot of lights on a lot of porches. With perhaps 70 sextillion stars in the universe (that's 7 followed by 22 zeros), the spacecraft can't possibly survey them all. Instead, it will sample about 100,000 in a region of our solar system known as Cygnus-Lyra. That spot was chosen both because it's rich in stars and because it lies above our own orbital plane. Kepler - which will be launched into not an Earth orbit but a solar orbit - can thus simply train...
...think those tiny pieces of junk can't do much harm, think again. According to a back-of-the-envelope rule the Apollo astronauts used, given the speeds involved in traveling in low-Earth orbit, a one-tenth-in. bit of chaff would collide with an oncoming spacecraft with as much force as a bowling ball traveling 60 m.p.h...
True killer collisions occur not when spacecraft traveling in the same band or orbital plane bump each other but when there's a full-blown crash between two ships in different planes - say, between one ship in an orbit that carries it over the U.S. and Central Asia, and another in an orbit that carries it over Western Europe and Eastern Asia. That's what happened on Tuesday...