Word: thistledown
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...meteoroid would collide, are less worried than laymen, but even so, they have planned on protecting long-range space vehicles with meteor bumpers. Now it seems that spacecraft will need no such shields. Space is indeed teeming with meteoroids, but most of them are fluffy stuff, harmless as thistledown...
People who got a good look at the sun's glowing corona during its recent eclipse may have seen faint veils of light trailing off into space. Appearing as harmless as thistledown, they were visible evidence of the sun's far-reaching violence. Stormy weather on the sun sometimes tosses out clouds of deadly particles, mostly protons, that can kill in a few minutes any humans riding in thin-walled spacecraft. So among the scientists who studied the corona were members of a new, specialized profession: solar meteorology. Their job is to learn to forecast solar weather...
Gravity in Thistledown. In the introduction to this new collection, Novelist-Critic Anthony Powell attempts to explain the down-to-earth gravity of Firbank's thistledown art, and to deal with the strange power of such lines as " 'He has only one eye and I never know which one is looking at me,' the Queen would sometimes complain." Although apparently a freakish offshoot of modern literature, Firbank was actually a great innovator, Powell suggests. Two masters of dialogue, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Evelyn Waugh, sat in Firbank's school. In fact, Firbank's exotics-improbable...
...heat, the loo's warm caresses are sensuous and pleasant. It brings up the prickly heat. It produces a numbness which makes the head nod and the eyes heavy with sleep. It brings on a stroke which takes its victim as gently as breeze bears a fluff of thistledown." -Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan...
...Schilt points out that landing on one of the small moons of Mars would cost practically nothing. The outer moon, Deimos, is about five miles in diameter, and has hardly any gravitation. The spaceship could drift toward it and, without expending fuel, come aboard as gently as thistledown. Then the crew would get a free ride around Mars, circling the planet every 30 hours and studying its surface from the fairly convenient distance of 12,500 miles. For a closer look they could shuttle to the inner moon, Phobos, which circles Mars only 3,700 miles away...