Word: data
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...satellites carried Harvard telescopes similar to this one. But the first telescope aboard OSO-II failed only seconds after being switched on, and a surge of electric power from a faulty transformer ruined the telescope on OSO-IV after six weeks of operation. However, the data from those six weeks has kept astronomers here more than busy for two years...
Harvard astronomers are particularly proud of OSO's flexibility. "An ordinary satellite takes the same type of data continuously," said Martin S. Huber, a Research Associate who calibrated the experiment. "But we have a real observatory with an almost infinite number of observation possibilities." The telescope can view the sun in one of 10,000 different wavelengths of ultra-violet light and can aim at a single point, take a picture of the entire sun, or scan an area only 1/15 the size of the sun's visible disc. Where earlier OSO satellites were able to take only one picture...
Goddard Space Center also serves as middle man for data coming from OSO to the Observatory. During each of its 15 daily orbits, the satellite records its observations on a 100 minute long tape. When it passes over a tracking station, the ground controller orders the satellite to replay the entire tape in about five minutes. The tracking station then relays the broadcast to Goddard which sends the data to the duty scientist at 60 Garden Street through a special teletype machine. Tracking stations also ship magnetic tapes of each transmission a week later, and these tapes are eventually analyzed...
...McLuhanesque gadget might seem to be the ultimate in efficiency, but its acceptance by the military epitomizes the failure of briefings. Even without benefit of computer, the armed-services style of communication has become a ritual recitation of memorized details, a reduction of experience to a set of quantifiable data. The supposedly hard fact has been glorified; the untidy, elusive concept has been smudged into a supposedly measurable statistic...
Although rooted in case history. Them is fiction in the purist sense: data, perception, feeling transformed by language and imagination into a new existence with a vitality that can even survive critical explanation...