Passage One Q. There's a lot of talk about putting upmanned orbital stations. What does this mean, concretely? A. It is very important to havescientific stations in space. A space telescope with a mirror slightly over sixand a half feet in diameter will be placed in orbit, and there will be more andmore of these. A few years ago, our group at Saclay, in collaboration with anumber of other European Laboratories, orbited a telescope that revolutionizedour knowledge of gamma-ray emissions by celestial objects. Life aboard manned space stations won'tbe as exciting as we might suppose. It will probably be comparable to the lifepeople lead aboard deep-sea oil rigs. Q. What scientific interest will thesestations offer? A. Observation is much more precisebeyond the atmosphere, because the sky is darker. You see many more stars andobjects that are concealed by the earth's luminescence. Q. What objects? A. We know pretty well how stars are bornbecause we can observe them.Two or three new stars appear in our galaxy everyyear. But nearly all the galaxies were born at the same time, when the universewas constituted 15 billion (light) years ago. No new ones are thought to exist. To observe the birth of a galaxy thathappened so long ago, you have to see a very long way. At present we can goback 10 to 12 billion years. We have to go a bit farther back still, and maybecatch them in the act of birth. Distant objects are necessarily very dim, soideal conditions are needed to observe them. Orbital stations provide suchconditions. Q. Would orbital stations be choiceplaces from which to try to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligences? A. Not particularly through radiocommunication, except on certain wave lengths that are absorbed by theatmosphere. But as points of departure for exploration they'll be very useful. Q. How far would such exploration go? A. In 1989 the satellite Voyager II willreach Neptune after a journey of three and a half years. In addition, fiveprobes were sent to rendezvous with Halley's comet. So exploration of the solarsystem is more or less under way. We've put people on the moon, sent probes toMars and Venus, lofted satellites near the sun(within a few tens of millions ofmiles), and one satellite even left the solar system a few years ago. But visiting the stars is something elseagain. Light takes four years to reach the nearest stars, so you can see thatit would take satellite hundreds of thousands of years.
We can learn from paragraph 13 that_____.
A、visiting stars is much harder than we can imagine
B、visiting stars is another experiment we will do in the near future
C、with the help of space stations, visiting stars will be much easier
D、with the help of satellites, visiting stars will gain popularity pretty soon
【正确答案】：A
