Word: stardust
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...looks as though they will. On Feb. 6 a remarkable space probe called Stardust is scheduled to take off for a January 2004 encounter with Comet Wild (pronounced Vilt) 2. With a tennis racquet-size collector, Stardust will snatch dust particles from the comet's tail as it flies by and then, in an audacious interplanetary maneuver, return to parachute its precious cargo to Earth two years later...
What's more, the entire mission is coming in at an absurdly cheap (for NASA) $165.6 million. Stardust is part of the space agency's "fast and cheap" Discovery series (Mars Pathfinder with its robot rover was another). Like Pathfinder (and unlike the instrument-packed billion-dollar probes of the 1970s and '80s), Stardust is as stripped down as it can be. The 848-lb. spacecraft carries just solar panels, a camera, a radio, a spectrometer to analyze sunlight bouncing off the comet, a few sensors and the all-important sample-collecting system...
...other instruments had to be light, but the collector had to be ingenious. Although the probe will loop two times around the sun to help it match orbits with the comet, Stardust and Wild 2 will still shoot past each other at nearly 4 miles per second, 10 times as fast as a speeding bullet. In order to catch dust particles without disintegrating them, Jet Propulsion Lab engineer Peter Tsou first thought of making a trap out of Styrofoam; he figured dust would bury itself harmlessly inside. Unfortunately, says Tsou, "cosmic dust particles are so small that on Styrofoam...
...Mitchell is in a good mood and in good voice, and she delivers a jazzy, ebullient set, floating through a few songs from her latest CD, Taming the Tiger. Then, alone with her guitar, she offers up a spare, resonant reading of her gently anthemic song Woodstock. "We are stardust...And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden..." she sings. The lyrics seem to belong to another age, an era of idealism and Abbie Hoffman and moon landings and electric Kool-Aid acid tests and B-52s bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But even...
Similarly, this year's playoff results do not approach the woefulness of the sweeps in 1988 and 1990. Note: I regard the 1995 season, in which the Sox were swept in three games by the Tribe, as a sacred, marvelous aberration, a magnificent stardust leap from oblivion to glory. Hence, I will generally refrain from discussing it here...