Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Yevgeny Yevtushenko read a New York Times article about his play Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty with the headline "An Anti-U.S. Play Is a Hit in Moscow," he saw red. Pointing out that he had toured the U.S. and admired its young people, Apollo 16, jazz and the Grand Canyon, Yevtushenko told the Times: "Neither I nor the director could ever produce an anti-American production, since genuine art cannot be anti-people." New York magazine added a footnote, gleefully noting that Yevtushenko had lunched with the editors and that "the enemy of capitalism...
...their second unmanned lunar rover in two years. Looking like an old-fashioned washtub sitting atop eight small wheels, Lunokhod (moonwalker) 2 rolled down the gangplank of its lander and parked itself in a mountainous region at the edge of the Sea of Serenity, only about 100 miles from Apollo 17's Taurus-Littrow base...
...apparently equipped with sophisticated gear to analyze the soil that it picks up. In addition, the robot carries a cosmic-ray counter, a "telescope" that can look for distant X-ray sources in the heavens and a French-built laser reflector, which -like similar reflectors left behind by Apollo-should enable scientists to measure the distance between earth and moon with extreme accuracy...
Early in the mission, Astronaut Ron Evans made his most notable photographic contribution; he took a picture that will rank among the classics of the space program. As Apollo sped toward the moon after blasting into its translunar trajectory, he pointed his camera back toward home and caught a stunning view of the earth, with the side visible to the astronauts completely illuminated. In crystal-clear detail it shows almost the entire coastline of Africa and the offshore island republic of Malagasy, the Arabian peninsula and an unusually thick cover of swirling clouds over Antarctica and the surrounding region...
Gamble. The excellence of the Apollo 17 photographs is also due in part to the quality of the film used by the astronauts. On previous missions, NASA'S photographic advisers opted for a fairly sensitive film similar to Ekta-chrome-EF; because lunar lighting conditions were uncertain, they wanted a fast emulsion. But for Apollo 17, the space agency decided to switch to another Kodak film that is somewhat slower (ASA rating of only 64 v. 160 for the earlier film), but has significantly less grain and better color reproduction. The gamble worked. The record 3,800 frames that...