Word: luna
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...beyond doubt one of the greatest achievements of Soviet science. By landing the unmanned Luna 9 spacecraft softly on the surface of the moon in condition to take and transmit pictures, Russian space scientists did more than edge ahead of the U.S. in the race to place a man on the lunar landscape. They proved that he would find a surface solid enough to stand on when he got there. Inexplicably, after announcing the landing, the Russians delayed capitalizing further on their triumph. Then, when British astronomers intercepted Luna 9's pictures and released them first, a Soviet scientist...
Earlier, the Russians had gone out of their way to tell the operators of Britain's giant 250-ft. Jodrell Bank radio telescope the precise frequency of Luna 9's transmissions. Forewarned, the British astronomers easily picked up and recorded the spacecraft's signals. Noting that they were suspiciously similar to ordinary wirephoto transmissions, the men at Jodrell Bank fed them into an ordinary facsimile machine hurriedly borrowed from London's Daily Express. The machine converted the signals into a light beam that varied in intensity as it mowed back and forth across photosensitive paper, producing...
...from about 10 ft. above a porous, pumicelike surface, the pictures showed a barren, forbidding crust, littered with jagged rocks and tiny pebbles that the Russians later revealed were as small as 1 or 2 millimeters wide. The lunar view suggested to University of Arizona Astronomer Gerald Kuiper that Luna 9 was probably resting on the floor of a small crater, that the rocks were only about a foot high, and that the horizon in the picture was actually formed by the crater's rim, apparently less than a mile away...
...propaganda harangue. "It seems, sir, both you and we are expecting some big news from up there tonight," began Reston vaguely enough. "What do you call 'Up there?' " snapped Kosygin. "Do you mean from God?" Reston only meant space shots-the U.S. Gemini 7 and the Soviet Luna 8-but the mood had been struck. Despite Reston's attempts at ingratiation ("I agree . . ." "I was certainly not suggesting . . ."), Kosygin laid out a rehash of anti-American propaganda that grew harsher by the minute...
When he heard that Luna 7 had successfully fired its braking retrorockets and had transmitted signals for three seconds after hitting the moon, Barringer became convinced that the craft was not demolished upon impact. The tardy retrorocket firing that probably made the difference between success and failure, Barringer decided, could have been caused by an altimeter error of as little as 30 ft. - which some scientists believe is the approximate depth of a layer of porous rock or partially compacted dust that covers the moon. Barringer's conclusion: Russian radar penetrated the moon's top layer, reflected back...