Word: sun
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When the talks got under way, Brezhnev was as cheerful as the Moscow sun flooding his office. He confided to U.S. newsmen that he still smokes at a furious pace in spite of a cigarette case with a time lock on it that he keeps hidden in his desk. Referring to the fact that Pepsi-Cola will soon be distributed in the Soviet Union-one of the accomplishments of détente-he said: "Maybe we can teach our people to drink less vodka and more Pepsi-Cola...
...innermost planet of the solar system, Mercury is almost always obscured by the sun's harsh glare. Under the best viewing conditions, it never appears as more than a hazy disk in earth-bound telescopes. Last week, as the Mariner 10 passed only 400 miles from the planet, some of the mystery about Mercury was finally dispelled. Radioing back the first close-up pictures of the Mercurian surface, the robot ship unveiled a bleak, cratered and totally forbidding world...
...generally attributed to the churning of molten iron in the spinning planet's core, Mercury seems to rotate much too slowly to produce such a dynamo effect. But scientists offer alternative explanations. Mercury's magnetic field may be created externally by bombardment of charged particles from the sun hitting the atmosphere-or it may be left over from an epoch when the spin was faster. The presence of an atmosphere is equally difficult to explain because the planet's gravity is too weak to prevent a gaseous envelope from escaping into space. But, says Project Scientist James...
Lopsided Orbit. Usually obscured by the bright glare of the sun, Mercury remains almost as much a mystery as the most distant planet, Pluto. Half again as large as the moon, Mercury may be almost twice as dense. Traveling in a lopsided orbit, it comes as close to the sun as 29 million miles, then sweeps as far away as 43 million miles. To anyone standing on Mercury's surface, the sun would seem to stand still at times, then move backward briefly, in the Mercurian sky. Another oddity: Mercury's trip around the sun takes 88 earth...
...Blizzard the butler, and the Wrecking Crew (four retired businessmen whose progress over the course resembles "one of those great race migrations of the Middle Ages"). As befits an idyl, the weather is routinely gorgeous ("butterflies loafed languidly, birds panted in the shady recesses of the trees"), and the sun shines gently...