Word: weatherings
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History Professor Charles S. Maier ’60 compared predicting a revolution in Iran to a weather forecast...
...failure? The first two explanations have largely been discounted (no terrorist group has claimed responsibility, and planes are built to shrug off lightning strikes). Most aircraft accidents stem from an unfortunate cascade of events rather than from any single system malfunction. It's becoming clearer that some combination of weather, an unknown flight-control failure and perhaps the crew's inability to respond is probably to blame. The pilots' margin for error at the time was small; in addition to encountering bad (but not extreme) thunderstorms, the plane was operating near its "coffin corner" - a combination of speed and altitude...
...crowds pour out of Imam Khomeini Station and into the Square. Already the gathering is huge. Citizens have arrived early, not the customary one to two hours behind schedule, "Iranian time" as its known. The weather has returned to normal this week. It is hot, made worse by the darkness of our clothing. Every day by early evening, however, fat and full clouds dominated the sky, forcing the sun to set through gray and imminent rain...
...this for the U.S. space program: we may have spent the past 40 years mostly ignoring the moon, but when we go back, we go back with a bang. Later today - if weather conditions and hardware permit - NASA will launch its much anticipated and deeply imaginative Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), the first American spacecraft of any kind to make a lunar trip since 1999. Not only will the LRO help us study the moon in greater detail than ever before, it should also give us our first look at the six Apollo landing sites since we abandoned the historic campgrounds...
Just as important for choosing where to homestead is knowing the local weather - or at least the local temperature. Nobody pretends that the moon will be a thermally comfortable place to live, but few people realize just how punishing its climate extremes are - a torch-like 250 degrees Fahrenheit (120 Celsius) during the day and a paralyzing -382 Fahrenheit (-230 Celsius) at night. What's more, says Garvin, "the moon goes through this dance every 28 days." Those kinds of cycling extremes can be murder on hardware, and until we know more about the hot-cold rhythm...