Word: orbital
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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Fortunately, the damage is not beyond repair. NASA plans to perform an in- orbit service call on the space telescope in 1993. In the meantime, pictures from the Hubble can be sharpened by computer enhancement. The telescope has taken some surprisingly good shots, including images of a gas jet streaming from a newborn star and a huge storm on Saturn...
Washington's uncharacteristic behavior arose from its desperate need to placate the Arab members of the anti-Saddam coalition. Certainly Saddam was doing his best to pull them into his orbit by exploiting the calamity in Jerusalem. The Iraqi President threatened to avenge the Palestinian deaths with powerful missiles he claimed to have added to his arsenal. Calling his new device the "Stone" (after the weapon of preference in the intifadeh), Saddam boasted that it had a range of hundreds of miles and could therefore hit "the targets of evil when the day of reckoning comes...
...revolution almost didn't happen. When Magellan first took up its elliptical orbit around Venus on Aug. 10, its communications system inexplicably stopped working. Then the equipment started up, letting the space probe send back a few tantalizing images -- and stopped once more. Fearful that the spacecraft would lose contact with Earth permanently, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is responsible for Magellan, put the imaging on hold while they tracked down the problem. It was apparently a faulty computer chip. Electronic signals have been rerouted to bypass the flaw, and meanwhile Magellan's control software is being...
...last year, signs with Detroit and threatens to become the first American Leaguer to bop 50 home runs since Mantle and Maris in '61. Dave Justice, toiling in Triple A, gets promoted to the haggard Atlanta Braves in mid-May and hits 28 home runs: out of nowhere, into orbit. The arms of half the Dodgers' pitchers fall off, but the slim, steely mound grace of rookie Ramon Martinez helps sustain Los Angeles in a last-gasp pennant race...
...Brilliant Pebbles -- thousands of small, independently controlled satellites designed to home in on and destroy enemy nuclear warheads. "The technology is at hand" to deploy a Brilliant Pebbles system, General George Monahan, then SDI director, assured Congress. The Pentagon contends that 4,614 Brilliant Pebbles could be put into orbit for $55 billion, vs. $69 billion for previous schemes...