Tag: space

Space stations revisited

  Forget cosmic radiation, the solar flares, meteorites, re-entry: the real danger facing space exploration today is red ink. As governments drown in it, some space projects have had more narrow escapes than Luke Skywalker. Consider International Space Station Alpha. A space station is a permanent inhabited base in orbit. People have been talking about …

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Satellites

Satellites have been much in the news recently–or, if you were trying to watch CBC Newsworld last week, in the absence of news. The failure of the Anik E-2 satellite drove home as nothing else could have just how important satellites have become to our everyday lives. (People really sit up and take note when …

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Space tomatoes

In 1984 NASA put into orbit a schoolbus-sized vehicle called the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF), which exposed various materials to space for six years. NASA should have asked Heinz to sponsor it, because not only were there 57 kinds of materials on board, one of those materials was 12.5 million tomato seeds. Those seeds …

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Space stations

  Having recently written about the Human Genome Initiative and the Superconducting Super Collider, it behooves me to write about the third “big science” project now in the works, Space Station Freedom. There was some question last year whether Space Station Freedom would ever be built–the U.S. Congress was considering dropping it from the budget. …

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Auroras and meteors

If you’re in the habit of looking up at the night sky, there’s a good chance you’ve seen two very interesting sights: northern lights and falling stars. The proper name for the northern lights is “aurora borealis.” Aurora was the Roman goddess of the dawn, their version of the Greek goddess Eos; borealis basically means …

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Stars

  Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are . . . Stars have always fascinated humans.  At the dawn of history, and probably even before, wise men watched the stars and learned to read them as markers of the turning of the seasons.  They attributed magical powers to the stars (a belief …

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Lucifer’s Hammer: the asteroid threat

Haven’t had anything to worry about for a while? Here, let me fix that… Sometime around the end of the ’70s I read a book called Lucifer’s Hammer, by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. It was a good book (a bestseller, in fact), but out of all its memorable scenes the one I remember best is …

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The mystery of the missing mass

The Mystery of the Missing Mass is not, as you might first suppose, the title of an Agatha Christie novel about a church service that failed to occur on schedule. It is, rather, one of the hottest (or coldest, depending on which theory you subscribe to– never mind, I’ll explain later) issues in the study …

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Sunspots

  If there’s one thing you can count on in this world–or out of it–it’s the sun, right? Always there, always shining behind the clouds, perfect, never-changing. Well… It was a cherished belief of people for many centuries that the sun was perfect and constant. But then along came the telescope. Galileo naturally turned his …

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Teledetection

I recently saw two pictures of southern Saskatchewan taken one year apart, in the summers of 1983 and 1984. The photographs are primarily green and pink. In the first photo there’s plenty of green, but also plenty of pink. In the second photo, the green has just about overwhelmed the pink. That might sound like …

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