Word: infra
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...NASA'S Goddard Space Flight Center under a $174.6 million program, ERTS cannot see objects smaller than 300 ft. across, but it has very acute color perception. Each of its three RCA TV cameras responds to a distinctly different wave length of light-green, red and near-infra-red. Transmitted to earth, the three separate images can readily be combined into a single, detailed color picture, and ERTS can produce a total of 9,200 pictures a week...
ERTS's infra-red scanners can perform more subtle detective work, since every object, living or inanimate, emits or reflects the various wave lengths of infra-red light with a different intensity. Chlorophyll, for instance, a key chemical involved in the production of oxygen by green plants, has a very distinctive infra-red "fingerprint." Thus, by the color variations in photos, future ERTS satellites could quickly detect any large-and possibly dangerous -change in the chlorophyll content of ocean plankton, a principal source of the world's oxygen supply. By similar "fingerprinting," ERTS and its successors could warn...
Laser-directed bombs usually require the coordination of at least two aircraft: one circles above and trains a pencil-thin beam of laser light on the target, while the other drops its bombs in the general direction of the object. Responding to infra-red sensors mounted in their noses, the bombs ride the beam's reflections in a long glide pattern to the target. Sometimes they strike within a 5-ft. radius of the bull...
Some U.S. aircraft are now being outfitted with laser "projectors" that train the beam for the plane's own bombs to follow. There are also infra-red bombs that home in on the heat of tank or truck engines...
...girl climbing into the Ningen Sentakuki will emerge moments later -scrubbed clean by hot water, massaged by small rubber spheres that are churned by high-frequency sound, and dried by the heat of an infra-red lamp. But at $6,600, the "human washing machine" developed by Osaka's Sanyo Electric Co. is out of reach of all but the filthy rich...