Word: earth
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...history. One sign was the Army's attempt to shoot the moon from Cape Canaveral last week-an attempt that was rated a failure because the Army's Pioneer III stopped rising after a breathtaking 66,654 miles out, gravitated back to burn up in earth's atmosphere (see SCIENCE). Another was the almost routine Defense Department announcement of an open-ended, long-term program to launch a series of low-flying eye-in-the-sky satellites weighing as much as 1,300 lbs., starting next month...
...made lake, storing 130 million acre-ft. of water-more than the combined capacity of the Shasta, Hoover and Grand Coulee dams in the American West. Soon the Kariba gorge, which had been inhabited only by crocodiles, hippos and an occasional Batonga hunter, echoed to the roar of earth-moving equipment...
Pioneer III was designed to attain a top speed of 24,486 m.p.h. This would have been enough to toss it free of the earth's gravitation and make it a satellite (or burned-up victim) of the sun. The actual speed attained, 23,606 m.p.h., was only enough to carry the gold cone 66,654 miles from the earth. It reached its high point in 20 hours of travel. Then it fell back. Gathering speed again in its long fall, it hit the earth about 20 hours later in a brief streak of flame in the night...
...optical gadget designed to send a radio signal when it saw a bright object the size of the moon at a distance of 22,000 miles. The instrument was shielded from the sun, and it would have been activated by a timing device only after the receding earth looked smaller than the approaching moon...
...satellite that crosses the north and south poles has one great advantage: it "sees" the whole earth. The plane of its orbit remains fixed in space, while the earth turns inside it. If the satellite's period of revolution is 90 minutes, it makes 16 north-south passes around the earth in a day, each pass being 22.5 degrees of longitude (about 1,560 miles at the equator) farther to the west than its predecessor. So a polar satellite, theoretically at least, can take pictures of the entire earth every twelve hours, thus act as a kind...