Word: moone
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...Amartya Sen is well known to everyone in the field," said Jeffrey Williamson, chair of the economics department. "Even if you're living on the moon, you know who he is. With his amazing contributions and research, he's been a steady presence...
Even for a supposedly spacefaring people, dreaming of Mars is dreaming big. Back when Apollo astronauts were routinely bunny-hopping on the nearby moon, Mars seemed like an obvious next goal. But during the past 25 years, the best we've been able to muster has been a few unmanned Martian probes. After the two most recent ones famously flamed out, and after last week's scathing report blaming nasa mismanagement for the failures, even that seems beyond...
...reach Mars, and what drove up the size of the spacecraft was all the fuel and other consumables it would need to carry with it on so long a trip. But while Mars is indeed remote--at its farthest it's 1,000 times as distant as the moon--it has a lot of things the moon doesn't, most notably an atmosphere. And that makes all the difference...
Whichever approach is chosen, what all of them have in common is the speed with which they could be pulled off. Unlike the early Apollo planners, who weren't even sure they could get astronauts into near-Earth space, much less fling them out to the moon, Mars-mission directors have the basic space-travel technology down cold. All they need is the go-ahead to design and build their machines...
...Nonetheless, NASA continues the search for unearthly life, even if it's only for little green bugs, under the more politically palatable label of astrobiology. Right now, NASA is eyeing the dusty surface of Mars (where water once flowed) and the likely ocean under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa as sites for primitive life-forms. One recent false alarm: the much trumpeted Martian meteorite found in Antarctica apparently does not contain convincing evidence of the existence of microorganisms on the Red Planet, as originally claimed...