Word: spacecrafts
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...takes a lot to dissuade Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Undeterred by Thursday's scuttled launch of the shuttle Endeavour because of a minor glitch, she returned at 3:35 a.m. Friday to watch the spacecraft blast off from Cape Canaveral. But her public relations presence notwithstanding, the merits of the mission still remain questionable, according to TIME science writer Jeffrey Kluger...
During those 32 years, however, something has changed. None of the handful of satellites orbiting the globe in 1966 was hit by a Leonid. But today the planet is circled by a bewildering variety of spacecraft--about 600 in all--that have become indispensable to modern society: relaying phone calls, e-mail and faxes; monitoring hurricanes, terrorist activities and crop yields. A collision with a meteor could damage or disable any one of them. That is why NASA, the Air Force and the Russian space agency are directing a wholesale reorientation of their fleets of orbiting spacecraft...
...dust particle could blast a hole nearly half an inch across in a solar panel or a layer of insulation. Equally threatening is the intense heat of impact, which would instantly vaporize the meteoroid and convert it to an ionized gas, or plasma, that would shock the spacecraft with an electrostatic charge. "If that charge got into some of your data circuitry," Riegler says, "it could wipe out data...
NASA is taking no chances. It will power down any threatened spacecraft to avoid short circuits and will temporarily orient each one, says Riegler, "so that its strongest side faces the incoming Leonids." Even the Hubble Space Telescope will turn its back to the meteoroids, to shield the aperture through which it scans the heavens. And the flat solar panels that energize most of the satellites will be turned edge on to the Leonid stream to minimize the possibility of impact...
...Until we go get our feet wet, there's no way of knowing for sure if the underground oceans actually exist. But when the spacecraft Galileo passed by these moons, it encountered strong disturbances in Jupiter's magnetic field -- too much to come from their cores, but just right for a highly conductive saltwater sea. Something 60 miles below the ice and about six miles deep, assuming they are as salty as their earthbound counterparts. You know, of course, what salt water means. "One could expect life in such oceans," said geophysicist Krishan Khurana, the lead author of the research...