Word: mission
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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UNSCOM was set up in 1991 as part of the truce agreement to end the Gulf War. It had a simple mission: to verify the destruction of Saddam's remaining missile, chemical- and biological-weapons capability. But U.N. inspectors quickly hit a wall: Saddam had no intention of cooperating with their inspections. So, eager to do their jobs, they turned from monitoring to spying to uncover his hidden caches. In interviews with key intelligence and military officials, TIME has pieced together that slow slide into espionage--one that peaked last March when a specially trained operative from the Pentagon...
...that office began to comb through its computers in the 1980s. Not many agencies or businesses got that long a head start. So no one really knows how bad things will get until the witching hour arrives. The Pentagon insists that 95% of its "mission critical" computers will be fixed by June and all of them before Dec. 31. But nuclear weapons systems in all nations--including Russia, where the state of Y2K preparations is anybody's guess--are computer dependent. In November the British American Security Information Council, a nuclear disarmament group, warned that a Y2K glitch could lead...
What a difference a little rocket fuel makes. Nozomi, an unmanned Japanese spacecraft on a mission to Mars since its launch last July, was supposed to reach the Red Planet's orbit this October. But an unforeseen adjustment in the craft's direction has used up more fuel than was projected, and Nozomi will be a little late -- four years, to be exact...
...long wait for Japan's first Mars mission, but timing is everything in space. "Flying from any cosmic point A to any cosmic point B is like leading ducks when you're hunting," says TIME senior writer Jeffrey Kluger, coauthor of the book "Apollo 13." "You can't aim for where a planet is, you have to aim for where it's going to be." With a Martian year lasting roughly two of our years, missing the rendezvous means you have a while to wait before the motion of the two bodies coincides again. "If an error of one degree...
When the Human Genome Project was launched a little under a decade ago, boosters compared it with the Manhattan Project or the mission to put men on the moon: an effort so complex and so broad in scope that only the government had the financial and bureaucratic resources to pull it off--yet with such huge potential payoffs that virtually no resources should be spared...