Word: geminis
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Clad in his cumbersome space suit and connected to Gemini by a white, 25-ft. oxygen and communications cord, Cernan methodically began his work. He attached a rearview mirror to the docking bar near Gemini's nose so that Stafford could watch and photograph him through a forward-facing window while he maneuvered near the aft end of the craft. Just behind the hatch, he clamped a 16-mm. movie camera into place...
Fogged-Up Experiment. After 55 minutes, and just as Gemini passed over the dark side of the earth, Cernan moved into position to prepare for his Buck Rogers-like flight in the jet-powered Astronaut Maneuvering Unit (AMU), stowed in the equipment section on Gemini's tail end. Struggling mightily, he pulled off the AMU's thermal cover, which had not been automatically jettisoned as planned after Gemini passed through the atmosphere on its way into orbit. Working with a check list calling for 32 separate operations, he began testing the AMU's propulsion and oxygen systems...
...Cernan groped his way back to the open hatch, Gemini circled into daylight again. Sunlight hitting the visor warmed it, but failed to evaporate the moisture. "I can see through my nose, but I can't see through my eyeballs," cracked Cernan. Then, two hours and nine minutes after he had stepped out into space, he climbed back into his hatch, panting with exhaustion...
Incandescent Re-Entry. Like almost everything else on Gemini 9's glitch-filled flight, space photography fell short of expectations. Just as he was about to close the hatch, Astronaut Cernan lost the film magazine and a lens from the movie camera that had recorded his space walk. As lens and film floated out of the spacecraft and into orbits of their own, he grabbed for them but missed. Understandably, Cernan did not follow. "I didn't feel like any more extravehicular activity," he explained. In addition, many of the 17 magazines of color film shot from inside...
...return into the earth's atmosphere, the astronauts took some vivid color movies of a sheath of gases glowing with purple, blue and green incandescence as it was heated by the friction of the spacecraft's passage. They were the first re-entry photographs ever taken. As Gemini plunged into denser atmosphere, the colors increased in brilliance: a sharply defined blue shock wave expanded, and hot, golden fragments ripped loose from the glowing heat shield to shoot past the window in a dazzling stream...