Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Gargantuan canyons, bottomless chasms (see map)-a land filled with hiding places for a future generation of deeper-diving submarines. Knowledge of this topography as well as of the mysterious currents that flow there will decide the future's underwater wars. Though the seas cover 70% of the earth's surface, oceanographers have carefully mapped only about a third of the world's ocean floor. The Russians have gone full steam on oceanography, have built the world's biggest fleet of floating oceanographic laboratories-14 large vessels v. the U.S.'s half-dozen*-and have...
...Gouged Earth. Desai leaves behind him an India exhaustedly beginning its twelfth year of independence. For all of its troubles-poverty, illiteracy, disease, violence -much has been accomplished. Considering the handicaps of 14 major languages and some 800 dialects, and the world's second largest supply of people (387 million), India is a model of governmental stability: since 1947, it has had the same Prime Minister, Nehru; the same ruling party, the Congress Party; the same governing philosophy, democratic socialism. Unlike most nations from the Mediterranean to the China Sea, India is not seriously threatened by a revolutionary group...
...Earth-Angled. In inertial navigation, every motion of a ship in any direction is accounted for and automatically computed to give precise distance traveled. The key instrument is an accelerometer -a container holding a weight that can move, against springs, toward one end or the other. The weight acts like a man's head that is jerked back because a cab driver starts suddenly. The weight thus measures a vehicle's thrust (acceleration), and from this information, an electronic computer can determine the vehicle's velocity. Inertial navigation uses two accelerometers, one to measure all north-south...
...work properly, the accelerometer cylinders must lie at right angles to the earth's radius lines; i.e., their weights must move along tangents to the earth's circumference. Otherwise, gravity, as well as lateral movement, would affect the weights. To hold the accelerometers steady, they are hinged to platforms, stabilized by gyroscopes, which keep an unchanging relationship to the earth (the platform of the north-south instrument, for instance, is always at the same angle to the polar axis). But the accelerometers do not remain immovable. Holding their tangential position, they must slowly tip on their platforms...
Chief complication is keeping the gyro platform absolutely stable and unaffected by gravity; it tends to drift. Such forces as bearing friction and the rotation of the earth itself tend to tilt the platform out of line. On the Nautilus the system apparently worked without significant drift for the full 96 hours under the ice, and eventually the Navy hopes for accuracy up to 90 days at a time...