William I. McLaughlin
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William I. McLaughlin
William I. McLaughlin (born 1935) is a retired American space scientist. After being awarded his PhD in mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley in 1968 (with a thesis on celestial mechanics), he worked at Bellcomm, Inc. in Washington D.C. on the Apollo lunar-landing program. In 1971 he joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he remained until his retirement in 1999. He participated in a number of projects, including Viking, SEASAT, and the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). He served as the JPL deputy directory of astrophysics, the manager of the Voyager 2 flight engineering office during the spacecraft's encounter with Uranus, and manager of the Mission Profiling and Sequencing Section. In 1977 he suggested that widely observable celestial events such as nova explosions may be used by hypothetical extraterrestrial intelligences for scheduling the transmission of signals. This would allow receivers in other stellar systems to estimate when the signals ...
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United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territories, nine Minor Outlying Islands, and 326 Indian reservations. The United States is also in free association with three Pacific Island sovereign states: the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau. It is the world's third-largest country by both land and total area. It shares land borders with Canada to its north and with Mexico to its south and has maritime borders with the Bahamas, Cuba, Russia, and other nations. With a population of over 333 million, it is the most populous country in the Americas and the third most populous in the world. The national capital of the United States is Washington, D.C. and its most populous city and principal financial center is New York City. Paleo-Americ ...
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Nova
A nova (plural novae or novas) is a transient astronomical event that causes the sudden appearance of a bright, apparently "new" star (hence the name "nova", which is Latin for "new") that slowly fades over weeks or months. Causes of the dramatic appearance of a nova vary, depending on the circumstances of the two progenitor stars. All observed novae involve white dwarfs in close binary systems. The main sub-classes of novae are classical novae, recurrent novae (RNe), and dwarf novae. They are all considered to be cataclysmic variable stars. Classical nova eruptions are the most common type. They are likely created in a close binary star system consisting of a white dwarf and either a main sequence, subgiant, or red giant star. When the orbital period falls in the range of several days to one day, the white dwarf is close enough to its companion star to start drawing accreted matter onto the surface of the white dwarf, which creates a dense but shallow atmosphere. This atmosphe ...
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Living People
Related categories * :Year of birth missing (living people) / :Year of birth unknown * :Date of birth missing (living people) / :Date of birth unknown * :Place of birth missing (living people) / :Place of birth unknown * :Year of death missing / :Year of death unknown * :Date of death missing / :Date of death unknown * :Place of death missing / :Place of death unknown * :Missing middle or first names See also * :Dead people * :Template:L, which generates this category or death years, and birth year and sort keys. : {{DEFAULTSORT:Living people 21st-century people People by status ...
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NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal
The NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal is awarded to US government employees only for notably outstanding leadership which affects technical or administrative programs of NASA. The leadership award may be given for an act of leadership, for sustained contributions based on a leader's effectiveness, for the productivity of the leader's program, or for the leader's demonstrated ability in developing the administrative or technical talents of other employees. Recipients 1970 * James C. Elms * Robert L. Krieger 1972 * Leonard Jaffe 1973 * Donald D. Arabian * Eugene H. Cagle * William C. Keathley * Edwin C. Kilgore * Eugene F. Kranz * Robert O. Piland * Stanley R. Reinartz * Philip C. Shaffer 1974 * John R. Casani * M. P. Frank * Robert A. Parker 1975 * Arnold D. Aldrich * Robert O. Aller * John P. Donnelly * Don M. Hartung * Seymour C. Himmel * Walter J. Kapryan * Robert N. Lindley * Bernard Lubarsky * Leslie H. Meredith * John J. Neilon * William H. Rock * Robert J. ...
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NASA Exceptional Service Medal
The NASA Exceptional Service Medal is an award granted to U.S. government employees for significant sustained performance characterized by unusual initiative or creative ability that clearly demonstrates substantial improvement in engineering, aeronautics, space flight, administration, support, or space-related endeavors which contribute to NASA programs. The medal was inherited by NASA from its predecessor organization, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) and featured the NACA emblem. The original NASA version featured the NASA seal. Notable recipients *Buzz Aldrin (1969) * Robert O. Aller (twice) *Neil Armstrong (1966) *Charles Bolden (thrice) * John R. Casani (1965) *Lin Chambers (2009) *Kevin Chilton *Eileen Collins (1998) *Michael Collins (1966) *Nagin Cox * William H. Dana *Jean Dickey (1998) * John H. Disher (twice, last in 1980) *Einar Enevoldson (1974 and 1980) *Christer Fuglesang (2010) * Fitzhugh L. Fulton (1977 and 1983) * Alfred Gessow (1974) *Gu ...
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Nova Cygni 1975
__NOTOC__ V1500 Cygni or Nova Cygni 1975 was a bright nova occurring in 1975 in the constellation Cygnus. It had the second highest intrinsic brightness of any nova of the 20th century, exceeded only by CP Puppis in 1942. V1500 Cygni was discovered shining at an apparent brightness of magnitude 3.0 by Minoru Honda of Kurashiki, Japan on 29 August 1975. It had brightened to magnitude 1.7 on the next day, and then rapidly faded. It remained visible to the naked eye for about a week, and 680 days after reaching maximum the star had dimmed by 12.5 magnitudes. It is an AM Herculis type star, consisting of a red dwarf secondary depositing a stream of material onto a highly magnetized white dwarf primary. The distance of the V1500 Cygni was calculated in 1977 by the McDonald Observatory at 1.95 kiloparsecs The parsec (symbol: pc) is a unit of length used to measure the large distances to astronomical objects outside the Solar System, approximately equal to or (au) ...
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Green Bank, West Virginia
Green Bank is a census-designated place in Pocahontas County in West Virginia's Potomac Highlands inside the Allegheny Mountain Range. Green Bank is located along WV 28. Green Bank is home to the Green Bank Observatory and is also close to the Snowshoe Mountain ski resort. As of the 2020 census, its population was 141. The community was named for a green riverbank near the original town site. National Radio Quiet Zone Green Bank is located within the National Radio Quiet Zone, which means that radio transmissions are heavily restricted by law. This policy is enforced by a "radio policeman" who uses specialized equipment to detect signals from unauthorized electronics. Green Bank is home to the Green Bank Telescope, the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope, which was operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) until September 30, 2016. Since October 1, 2016, the Telescope has been operated by the Green Bank Observatory, which is no longer part of the ...
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National Radio Astronomy Observatory
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is a federally funded research and development center of the United States National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. for the purpose of radio astronomy. NRAO designs, builds, and operates its own high-sensitivity radio telescopes for use by scientists around the world. Locations Charlottesville, Virginia The NRAO headquarters is located on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. The North American ALMA Science Center and the NRAO Technology Center and Central Development Laboratory are also in Charlottesville. Green Bank, West Virginia NRAO was, until October 2016, the operator of the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, which stands near Green Bank, West Virginia. The observatory contains several other telescopes, among them the telescope that utilizes an equatorial mount uncommon for radio te ...
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Radio Telescope
A radio telescope is a specialized antenna and radio receiver used to detect radio waves from astronomical radio sources in the sky. Radio telescopes are the main observing instrument used in radio astronomy, which studies the radio frequency portion of the electromagnetic spectrum emitted by astronomical objects, just as optical telescopes are the main observing instrument used in traditional optical astronomy which studies the light wave portion of the spectrum coming from astronomical objects. Unlike optical telescopes, radio telescopes can be used in the daytime as well as at night. Since astronomical radio sources such as planets, stars, nebulas and galaxies are very far away, the radio waves coming from them are extremely weak, so radio telescopes require very large antennas to collect enough radio energy to study them, and extremely sensitive receiving equipment. Radio telescopes are typically large parabolic ("dish") antennas similar to those employed in tracking an ...
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Epsilon Eridani
Epsilon Eridani ( Latinized from ε Eridani), formally named Ran, is a star in the southern constellation of Eridanus, at a declination of 9.46° south of the celestial equator. This allows it to be visible from most of Earth's surface. At a distance of from the Sun, it has an apparent magnitude of 3.73. It is the third-closest individual star or star system visible to the unaided eye. The star is estimated to be less than a billion years old. Because of its relative youth, Epsilon Eridani has a higher level of magnetic activity than the present-day Sun, with a stellar wind 30 times as strong. Its rotation period is 11.2 days at the equator. Epsilon Eridani is smaller and less massive than the Sun, and has a comparatively lower level of elements heavier than helium. It is a main-sequence star of spectral class K2, which means that energy generated at the core through nuclear fusion of hydrogen is emitted from the surface at a temperature of about , giving it an ...
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Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Extraterrestrial intelligence (often abbreviated ETI) refers to hypothetical intelligent extraterrestrial life. The question of whether other inhabited worlds might exist has been debated since ancient times. The modern form of the concept emerged when the Copernican Revolution demonstrated that the Earth was a planet revolving around the Sun, and other planets were, conversely, other worlds. The question of whether other inhabited planets or moons exist was a natural consequence of this new understanding. It has become one of the most speculative questions in science and is a central theme of science fiction and popular culture. Intelligence Intelligence is, along with the more precise concept of sapience, used to describe extraterrestrial life with similar cognitive abilities as humans. Another interchangeable term is '' sophoncy,'' first coined by Karen Anderson and published in the 1966 works by her husband Poul Anderson. Sentience, like consciousness, is a concept sometimes ...
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