Word: apollo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...look of the Mercury and Gemini capsules. By comparison, the lunar module (LM) that lifted from Cape Kennedy last week was the ugliest of ducklings. Bulging and misshapen, bristling with squiggles of antennas, the LM seemed more the creation of scientists gone mad than a craft entrusted with Project Apollo's most crucial task: to land astronauts on the moon and lift them off again. But in a seven-hour test flight, LM last week performed like a full-fledged space swan...
Launched by the same Saturn I rocket atop which the fatal Apollo fire occurred last year, the LM was protected on its flight through the atmosphere by a nose cone and a cone-shaped adapter. After the second stage had been inserted into orbit, the nose cone was jettisoned and the adapter's four panels slowly opened like the petals of a flower, exposing LM to its natural environment: the vacuum of space, in which it can fly as efficiently as a streamlined rocket. Then, on command from LM's on-board computer, the craft briefly fired...
...thrust descent engine, which was to begin at 10% of its rated power and gradually throttle up to almost full operational power after 26 seconds. The operation was designed to simulate the burn that would put the LM on a trajectory from the moon-orbiting Apollo command ship to the lunar surface. But after only four seconds of firing, the descent engine was shut down by LM's overcautious computer, which had sensed trouble because thrust was not being built up as rapidly as planned...
Thus, in a single test, NASA was able to prove that both LM engines work well, that the descent engine can be throttled in space-the first big operational engine to do so-and that the Apollo mission could be safely aborted, if necessary, during the final descent to the lunar surface. The near-perfect results may enable NASA to cancel plans for a second unmanned LM flight and to move directly into a manned orbital flight-to check out LM's life-support systems-late in 1968. Looking further ahead, LM's success has also raised hopes...
...engineering test that was a preliminary to actual laser experiments during the Apollo moon mission, a group headed by University of Maryland Physicists Carroll Alley and Douglas Currie set up the lasers in four East Coast locations in addition to the two in the West. Each was projected backwards through a telescope-into the viewing end-toward Surveyor's lunar site. The telescopes were used not only to aim the beams precisely but also to further confine the beam of the coherent laser light, which diverges very little even without telescopic aid. Alley estimates that both beams had diverged...