Word: light
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Back in the sky over the Pacific on Friday, physics and chemistry will take over. The interceptor's three sensors--two detecting heat and one detecting visible light--all share the telescope that juts out its front end. The visible-light sensor will get the interceptor into the right neighborhood, but only the infrared sensors can guide it into its target, gently steering it with minithrusters powered by 30 lbs. of liquid rocket fuel. For the heat-detecting sensors to "see" anything, they must be chilled to -330[degrees]F using nitrogen and krypton, funneled to the sensors through...
Each sensor's 65,000 pixels will feed signals into the interceptor's brain, where lightning-fast calculations involving heat, light, mass and motion are cranked into databases searching for the ballistic fingerprints of enemy warheads. As the interceptor rushes toward its possible targets (the warhead, the balloon and the launch container), it will keep them all within view for as long as possible before discarding the ones its computers say have the least likelihood of being the warhead...
...group called Citizens for Better Medicare, which spent about $30 million on ads opposing Bill Clinton's proposal for extending Medicare to cover prescription drugs, is funded by pharmaceutical companies but won't say which ones. House majority whip Tom DeLay, the loudest congressional opponent of shining a light on 527 groups, is tied to a more opaque one called the Republican Majority Issues Coalition, which has vowed to spend up to $25 million supporting the G.O.P. in the upcoming election--but won't say where the dough is being raised or exactly how it will be spent...
...clear, blue-golden - such a sweet, frictionless light that from a hilltop I see the Catskills across the Hudson, miles to the west. In a wetland by the road, a great blue heron prospects for frogs, standing poised in the early evening clarity, utterly still... then strikes with a lightning flash of beak. At my approach, the heron rouses itself in a cumbersome fluster, and rises in the air and flaps off in prehistoric, slow-motion grace, topping the red pines...
...There's going to be a storm." A dark, ominous haze had gathered - disorienting indeed. The water of the Sound had become indistinguishable from the air - all was an inky continuum, a squid's cloud. Only when we looked higher, into the upper air, did we see vestiges of light. We lit a fire and talked awhile, and night descended. The storm never came. We went to sleep...