Also we have a rendezvous point after six months.
The stones are sometimes handed over at a roadside rendezvous soon after a heist, explained one gang member, with some buyers reportedly turning up in vans with their own specialised diamond-grading machines in order to value the goods.
Addendum: Rendezvous readers: After this post was published, Jon Campbell, the author of "Red Rock," sent me an e-mail note about current Chinese bands whose music carries a political message, and he has agreed that I can share it as a comment to my post.
The asteroid, whose uncertainty ellipsoid is initially too large to establish whether (and how) it should be deflected, is reached by the rendezvous spacecraft after a low-thrust interplanetary trajectory of reasonable duration.
That rendezvous came shortly after the orange revolution in Ukraine, when Ukrainian rockers such as Okean Elzy whipped up the crowds.
They were told to proceed separately to the rendezvous point, and, after arriving, to keep out of sight as much as possible by staying in shadows or by taking cover in the vestibules of buildings.
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft, after a four-year journey from Earth, on Feb. 14 became the first to orbit an asteroid and settle in for long-term studies.
After rendezvous, the Rosetta spacecraft moved from 100 km above the comet to a bound orbit only ~10 km away.
Typical ADR scenarios rely on an Orbital Transfer Vehicle (OTV) using one of the two following disposal strategies: the first one consists in attaching a deorbiting kit, such as a solid rocket booster, to the debris after rendezvous; with the second one, the OTV captures the debris and moves it to a low-perigee disposal orbit.
