Word: apollo
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Even to veteran splashdown watchers Apollo 16's return to earth last week was a spectacle of rare beauty. The slow blossoming of the spacecraft's three orange and white parachutes against the bright, azure sky seemed designed for maximum drama. Then, in a final demonstration of precision, the spacecraft Casper hit the water only one mile off the bow of the recovery carrier Ti-tonderoga. Once out of its natural element, Casper immediately capsized; it bobbed nose down in the choppy South Pacific for five minutes until the astronauts-strapped in upside-down and rapidly becoming queasy...
...doubt about it. For all the problems they had encountered on the way to the moon and in the process of setting up their experiments, the Apollo 16 astronauts scored a scientific triumph. Young and Duke spent 20 hours and 14 minutes prowling the lunar surface, only three-quarters of an hour short of their original goal. They also collected so much moon material that they nearly ran out of collection bags. Most significant of all, the next to last Apollo mission has already given scientists valuable new details about the terrain that makes up more than...
...questions relayed by Mission Control during a televised press conference. "We've seen as much in ten days," Young concluded, "as most people see in ten lifetimes." He may have been too modest. For all of the mission's mishaps, the information gathered during the flight of Apollo 16 may well enable man to "see" back to the very beginnings of his world...
...Wire watchers in newsrooms from coast to coast got a jolt one night last week when Associated Press printers broke into a bulletin on Apollo 16's blast-off from the moon with: "Listen, my children, and you shall hear/ Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere . . ."The Longfellow classic then lapsed into some blue doggerel dealing with Revere's sexual prowess. It turned out that an A.P. technician in New York, using the hoary rhyme to test what he thought was an in-house circuit, had inadvertently cut into the agency's "A" wire, the conduit...
...first that I would prefer to avoid," he says. But Berry hopes to score a first by learning-with greater precision than last time-how much potassium is lost by astronauts traveling and working in space. To do this, he determined the preflight potassium levels of each of the Apollo 16 astronauts. He has also asked them to bring back urine samples from a test to be conducted during the flight, and is confident that a comparison of the two levels will prove significant. "Those urine bags," says Berry with a researcher's peculiar enthusiasm, "are pure gold...