Word: discovereres
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Called off last week by the U.S. Air Force was the great capsule hunt in the icy wilds of Spitzbergen. There-somewhere-the telltale orange parachute with the instrumented nose capsule of Discoverer II was seen to drop into the mountains after it was ejected from orbit. And there Norwegian...
But computations, made shortly after the launching, showed that Discoverer II was orbiting faster than anticipated: 90.5 minutes for the round trip instead of 94 minutes. Quickly, scientists pinpointed the spot where the automatic ejection would occur: the area of Norway's Spitzbergen archipelago, far beyond the Arctic Circle...
Its heart was an inertial-reference package made by Dynamics Corp. of America. Through an intricate system of tiny gyroscopes, it gave Discoverer II a continuous sensing of its motion and attitude in space. When the second-stage rocket separated, the inertial-reference package squirted jets of high-pressure helium...
Satellites are getting more sophisticated. The first few tumbled any which way through space; now they are expected to perform all sorts of complicated maneuvers. The Air Force's Discoverer II, whose re-entry capsule came to earth embarrassingly close to northern Russia last week (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), was...
Once in orbit, the little jets went back into action. To keep the satellite horizontal, they had to make it turn just as fast as it circled the earth: one revolution, one turn. This was done by an infrared scanner, which watched the line of the horizon ahead and released...