Word: descent
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...police descent upon the Woods estate followed two possibly significant breaks in the case, which has spurred one of the greatest manhunts in California's history. The first came when a National Audubon Society group, on an outing in the Santa Cruz mountains some 40 miles from the Livermore quarry, stumbled upon notebooks, clothing and shoes belonging to the Chowchilla students, and an ID card owned by the children's bus driver...
...rhapsodic mood in the mission-control room at J.P.L. was in sharp contrast to the tense atmosphere earlier that morning when the Viking 1 lander responded to a command by separating from the orbiter and beginning its 3-hr. 17-min. descent to the surface. Penetrating the Martian atmosphere, it shed its clamshell-like protective covering, deployed a 53-ft.-diameter parachute to slow its descent, and shortly before touchdown fired its retrorockets to brake its fall further. Engineers at J.P.L. watched nervously as the signals on their consoles marked the completion of each stage of the landing procedure. Because...
...flow freely on the Martian surface in earlier days; Viking's orbital pictures show that the planet is crisscrossed by dry "riverbeds" and sinuous valleys, including a deep Grand Canyon-like depression called the Valles Marineris, that were probably carved out by running water. During Viking's descent, the lander's instruments sniffed and measured both nitrogen (3%) and argon (1.5%) in the Martian atmosphere. Nitrogen is an essential element in the molecules of terrestrial life. Also, the presence of approximately the same percentage of argon found in the earth's air suggests that Mars...
...coast in 1970. Besides, the submarines-famed for their noisiness-are absurdly easy to detect. When they dive, observes one Norwegian navy officer, they sound "like the flushing of an antique toilet." The sub involved in the Sjevik incident was not even given a chance to make a rackety descent. After it had dragged the Norwegian ship backward and then finally surfaced, crewmen scrambled to cut away the trawler's cable from the disabled sub's bow, where it had become entangled. Then the Soviet skipper churned off on the surface toward Murmansk without so much...
...between the principles and the potential on the one hand and the reality on the other is still frighteningly wide, even within America. Americans of non-European descent are still having to struggle to achieve for themselves their full rights as American citizens, equal with all others. Extreme poverty, and even hunger, exist among a sizable minority of American people. There appears to be almost a breakdown of many of the public and communal services which are vital to civilized life and in respect of which we would expect America to be an example to the rest of struggling humanity...