Word: spacecraft
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...from putting nuclear weapons into orbit, the treaty also requires space-faring nations to avoid "harmful contamination" of other worlds while exploring the solar system. Human beings have yet to set foot on other planets, so the risk today comes from bacteria that can hitch a ride on unmanned spacecraft like NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander, which arrived on the red planet's surface last May. (See pictures of the Mars Rover's five years in space...
...which would have direct contact with Martian ice, was heat-sterilized before launch, it's likely that dozens or more species of microbes hitched a ride on Phoenix's 10-month trip to Mars. Once on Mars, it's possible that bacteria shielded by the structure of the spacecraft from the harsh Martian UV radiation could stay alive, in dormancy, for hundreds of thousands of years. And if native microbes do exist on Mars - nothing has been found yet, but scientists hold out hope that the ice present on parts of the planet harbors life - there's a risk that...
...sheer breadth of the Pentagon's secret world: "Every year, the United States spends more than $50 billion to fund a secret world of classified military and intelligence activities, a world of secret airplanes and unacknowledged spacecraft, 'black' military units and covert prisons, a secret geography that military and intelligence insiders call the 'black world'...Approximately four million people in the United States hold security clearances to work on classified projects in the black world. By way of contrast, the federal government employs approximately 1.8 million civilians in the 'white' world...
...only until conditions improved and they shook off the dust, stirred to life and puttered off to do more work. So far, Spirit and Opportunity have beamed home a quarter of a million images and 36 gigabytes of data and revealed more about Martian history than any other spacecraft in a half-century of space travel. And by all indications, they could be keeping it up for a long time to come...
...involved turning the ship backward and firing its powerful service propulsion engine for precisely four and a half minutes - an eternity in a business in which barely a breath from a thruster is enough to set a ship spinning off course. The engine burn was designed to slow the spacecraft down just enough to ease it into a lunar orbit without losing so much altitude that it crashed into the moon instead. Orbital mechanics also demanded that the maneuver occur on the dark side of the moon, entirely out of radio contact with Earth. At 68 hours and 58 minutes...