Which of the following sentences, if placed before sentence 1, would both capture the audience’s interest and provide the most effective introduction to the topic of the paragraph?
A. NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter was launched on December 11, 1998, from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
B. On September 23, 1999, NASA officials were aghast when the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter vanished as it prepared to enter the red planet’s orbit.
C. As part of a new set of missions intended to survey the planet Mars, the Mars Climate Orbiter was launched by NASA scientists to study Mars’s climate and weather.
D. When NASA officials lost contact with their Mars Climate Orbiter on September 23, 1999, they immediately instigated a search for the spacecraft using NASA’s Deep Space Network of radio antennae.
E. The Mars Climate Orbiter carried two instruments when it attempted and failed to enter Mars’s orbit in September, 1999: the Mars Climate Orbiter Color Imager (MARCI) and the Pressure Modulated Infrared Radiometer (PMIRR).
FOR AP ENGLISH
