Word: lander
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...test Martian soil for evidence of life. Next August, in the climax to NASA'S $1 billion Project Viking, two unmanned spacecraft will be fired aloft from Cape Canaveral. After an eleven-month journey, the Viking ships will swing into orbit around Mars. Each will release a lander containing a life-seeking laboratory. After descending with the aid of parachute and braking rockets, the first sterilized package should touch down on July 4, 1976, near the mouth of a 3,000-mile-long gorge that cuts across the Red Planet like a Martian Grand Canyon. The second probe...
...Judy Lander is the strongest of the performers and has some of Brel's best songs to sing. In "Old Folks" she sings with the slow pace and gentle hesitations that mark elderly people's speech patterns, and at the same time captures the ticking rhythm of the clock that is measuring their final hours. In "Carousel" her voice turns into a whirling machine moving at a furiously accelerating pace. Like the machine, the voice comes towards us and then recedes as it goes round and round. The voice becomes the cycle of fate that condemns people to relive...
...with the spectacular photos taken by Mariner 9 in 1972. But the other Soviet Mars probes did not fare so well. Another intended orbiter went shooting by the planet, apparently because of trouble with its braking rocket. A third ejected a landing capsule that missed the planet completely. Another lander, fired from the fourth spacecraft, entered the Martian atmosphere but mysteriously stopped sending signals as it descended. (One theory: it may have been destroyed by the planet's high winds.) Before the signals ceased, Soviet scientists determined that the Martian atmosphere contains "several times" more water than expected. That...
...usual, the Russians are tight-lipped about the project. But Western observers believe that the spacecraft might release a smaller lander. If so, that would mean a rerun of last year's Mars 3 mission, when a TV-equipped instrument package was dropped on the Martian surface. The unit ceased sending signals after 20 seconds-possibly because it was buffeted by the Red Planet's hurricane-force winds. By contrast, the U.S.'s Mariner 9 spacecraft, launched at approximately the same time, worked for almost a year while in orbit around Mars, taking more than...
...imminent deluge: $112 million. It has been so mild in Wisconsin that a recent snowmobile championship race in Eagle Rock had to be run on sawdust. In New York City minimal snowfall meant a budgetary windfall: millions of dollars allocated for snow removal were never spent. Meanwhile, Lander, Wyo., this winter froze solid at an average of 10.6° below its norm...