Word: solarized
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...moment the green light was given, engineers and others on the project began to put in 90-hour work weeks-figuring, designing, double-checking and, as it turned out, sometimes starting over. At the same time, NASA was preparing for another rescue, the repair in space of the Solar Maximum Mission scientific satellite damaged in 1980. The space agency set out to fix the sophisticated $75 million instrument on the eleventh shuttle flight last April. But Astronaut George Nelson was unable to grasp the Solar Max with a device mounted on the arms of his backpack. An alternate technique worked...
...Solar Max had been built with retrieval in mind; it had a grappling pin in the middle of its belly. Palapa-B2 and Westar6 are of the old-fashioned expendable variety, with smooth sides and no handles. The stinger, measuring 64 in. and consisting of a pole mounted on a round base, solved the problem neatly. It would inject an expanding prong into the satellite's rear motor, locking on to it and providing a grip for the wrangler-astronauts. As Allen explained, "It's like opening an umbrella inside a chimney." In practice sessions Allen could...
...crew's involvement in mission planning was not limited to the stinger. Hauck suggested that the shuttle close to within 35 ft. of the satellites, instead of the 200-ft. distance maintained with Solar Max. The reason: to save the backpack's propulsion fuel. Meanwhile, ground controllers made plans to slow the satellites' spin from 22 to two rotations a minute. They prepared to send signals, putting the two satellites in the same orbital plane, 690 miles apart...
Peering out across the broad, lonely wastes of space, scientists have long wondered if there were intelligent beings on other worlds. Now two astronomers have found strong evidence that planets like earth and its eight celestial cousins in the sun's solar system may be common in the Milky Way. In a new, highly detailed photograph of Beta Pictoris, a neighborly 293 trillion miles from the sun, Bradford Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson and Richard Terrile of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., have discovered that the star is encircled by a dim disc...
...most blinding light of a star, making a kind of eclipse. With Beta in shadow, Terrile and Smith then attached a special detector to the telescope that picked up the weakest light signals around Beta. The resulting image of an encircling disc looked remarkably similar to our own solar system. Analyzing the configuration of the disc with a computer, they found that some matter may have condensed to form planets...