Word: spacecrafts
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...NASA's Magellan spacecraft seems to have found one more horror in the nasty landscape: active volcanoes. Last week the space agency released the first detailed map of Venus and the most spectacular images ever made of its surface. The pictures offer the best evidence to date that a planet once presumed dead is actually a lively cauldron of geological change...
...concept of the Global Positioning System is simple. With the help of an on-board atomic clock, each satellite in the network continuously broadcasts a signal indicating the time and the spacecraft's exact position. (A total of 16 satellites are now aloft; there will be 24, including three spares, when the system is completed in 1993.) A GPS receiver uses simultaneous readings from three different satellites to "fix" the user's longitude and latitude...
...scientists, attention seems focused on their failings and excesses, both real and perceived. Why, critics ask, after a decade of effort, have researchers not found a cure for AIDS, or why can't they figure out, after nearly a half-century, how to store nuclear wastes safely or build spacecraft that work? Why do they concoct compounds that end up as toxic waste or court danger by tinkering with genes...
...nine-day life-sciences mission, originally scheduled for the mid-1980s. During the most recent delay, engineers were horrified to discover, more or less by accident, that sensors in Columbia's fuel line were cracked. If one had broken loose, it could have been sucked into the spacecraft's powerful pumps, causing the ship to explode in a replay of the Challenger disaster. Apparently nobody had ever thought of checking the fuel line's sensors before...
Amid deeply furrowed fields 25 miles southeast of Moscow -- behind concrete walls, barbed wire and a sign reading FORBIDDEN ZONE -- sprawls the Central Aerohydrodynamics Institute. Employing 10,000 scientists and technicians, the research center combines the theoretical study of aerodynamics with practical experiments on airplanes and spacecraft. In one hangar-size workshop, stress- testing sensors cling like barnacles to prototypes of the new MiG-31 fighter and the next generation of Soviet civilian airliners, the Tu-204 and Il-114. Nearby is the T-128 transonic wind tunnel, where the space shuttle Buran and the Energiya booster rocket were tested...