Word: reflectors
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...scrap of paper on fire. Solar radiation can also be concentrated on a much more awesome scale. It can burn a hole through thick steel plate, for example, or simulate the thermal shock of a nuclear blast. It can, that is, with the aid of a super reflector of the sort that has been set up by French scientists high in the Pyrenees. Ten years in the building, the world's largest solar furnace is a complex of nearly 20,000 mirrors and can concentrate enough sunlight to create temperatures in excess...
...also noted surprisingly large amounts of such rare gases as argon, neon, krypton and xenon, which suggested that the moon may prove a promising solar observatory. At California's Lick Observatory, astronomers were finally able to get a reading on the distance between earth and moon. Using the reflector left behind by the astronauts, the Lick astronomers calculated that their distance from Tranquillity Base at the time was precisely 227,000.42 miles...
...turned his car right onto a dirt road leading to the wooden bridge and to the beach beyond. In his first statement to police, Kennedy explained that he had simply made a wrong turn, heading to the right. That meant he would have had to overlook a reflector arrow pointing the way to the ferry, and longtime residents say that all of the Kennedy brothers knew?or should have known?the area very well. The question arises: Could the Senator have traveled six-tenths of a mile down an unpaved road without knowing that he was on the wrong course...
...second Apollo experiment also ran into difficulty. Astronomers at the McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Texas, the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, Calif., and the Haleakala Observatory on Maui, Hawaii, were unable to locate the lunar reflector, an arrangement of 100 prisms that they hoped would reflect laser beams from earth. The beams were to be used as a precision measuring tool that would yield, among other things, the exact distance between earth and moon, proof of whether there is really any drift between continents and accurate figures on the earth's wobble. The major reason for the trouble...
...went to work immediately. It recorded and transmitted to earth evidence of the tremors caused when Aldrin hammered tubes into the lunar surface to collect core samples. It also registered the thud when the astronauts dropped their backpacks from Eagle's hatch. But the first test of the laser reflector failed when a beam shot from California's Lick Observatory missed the reflector by about 50 miles...