Word: solarized
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...Budget Satellite (ERBS). Bearing three scientific instruments, the satellite is designed to measure the amount of energy that bounces from the sun into the earth's atmosphere, where it is swirled about by wind and water and partly tossed back into space. By better understanding the dynamics of solar radiation, scientists hope they may be able to predict world weather patterns more accurately. But when Ride applied her expertise with the Canadian-built 50-ft. remote manipulator arm to lift the ERBS from the shuttle's cargo bay, two 12-ft. by 8-ft. solar panels...
...produced its own string of successes: the first 3 manned voyages to and from the moon in 1969, 1971 and 1972; the unmanned landing on Mars in 1976; and Pioneer 10, the first man-made object to leave the solar system, in 1972. But by 1975, the American commitment to space travel had begun to flag. In the tortoise-and-hare space competition, the methodical Soviets crept doggedly ahead, depending on incremental improvements in tried-and-true technologies, rather than the explosive leaps that have characterized American scientific and engineering advances in space...
...solar system passes through the central plane, it may collide with one of the massive dust clouds. While the cloud itself would have little graviational effect on the earth or the sun, its gravitational pull would. The strong lure would perturb the Oort cloud--a vast spherical shell of trillions of icy particles which surround the solar system...
Although such objects are as far as 10 trillion miles away, they clearly can effect the earth. If the solar system passed through the Oort cloud, a bombardment of comets would shake loose. Even if a small fraction of them made contact with the earth, the impact would blow enough debris into the atmosphere to cut off sunlight and cause a cosmic winter, ultimately extinguishing most of the life on the planet...
...other scientists have been quick to point out a key flaw. The solar system right now is passing through the central plane of the Milky Way and quickly approaching the dust clouds. Thus we should now be experiencing the first stages of the bombardment. But since we have yet to be blown into the stratosphere with the rest of the planet, researchers say they have grown somewhat skeptical...