Word: spacecrafts
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...demonstrated the vulnerability of space launches. Not surprisingly, many scientists are bothered by the idea of putting these two technologies together. In 1989, antinuclear activists, protesting potential "Chernobyls in the skies," organized the first civil-disobedience demonstrations aimed at halting a U.S. space shot. Their target: NASA's Galileo spacecraft, an interplanetary scientific mission that used as its power source two | radioisotope thermoelectric generators fueled by plutonium. In October 1989, the Galileo launch went off without a hitch, despite the protests...
...department, and wars break out. Let the master race linger too long in the industrial age, and the planet is choked with pollution. If, on the other hand, you steer your beings adroitly toward the ages of information and nanotechnology (molecule building), they will spontaneously load themselves into tiny spacecraft, turn the earth into a wildlife preserve and take off to colonize other planets -- the closest thing to "winning" this game...
...veil is coming off. Last week NASA's Magellan spacecraft transmitted the most detailed pictures ever made of Earth's next-door neighbor. The radar images revealed a tortured topography with fault-like cracks in surprisingly regular patterns, craters as big as greater Los Angeles and volcanic mountains flanked by congealed rivers of lava at least 320 km (200 miles) long. Says James Head III, a Brown University geologist and member of the Magellan imaging team: "It's a revolutionary new view of Venus...
...revolution almost didn't happen. When Magellan first took up its elliptical orbit around Venus on Aug. 10, its communications system inexplicably stopped working. Then the equipment started up, letting the space probe send back a few tantalizing images -- and stopped once more. Fearful that the spacecraft would lose contact with Earth permanently, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is responsible for Magellan, put the imaging on hold while they tracked down the problem. It was apparently a faulty computer chip. Electronic signals have been rerouted to bypass the flaw, and meanwhile Magellan's control software is being...
...Cape Canaveral last week, technicians prepared to move the shuttle Atlantis from its launching pad back to the vehicle-assembly building for repairs after failing to halt the seepage of hydrogen from a flange connecting fueling pipes to the spacecraft's giant external tank. As a result, all three U.S. shuttles are grounded while NASA continues to probe the cause of the mysterious leaks, not only in Atlantis but also in its sister ship Columbia...