Word: lunar
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Their optimism washed over into the Apollo moonshot program. Where officials were recently talking about 1970 as the likely year for the first U.S. lunar landing attempt, last week they were talking about 1969, and Apollo Manager Joseph Shea said the first at tempt might even come in mid-1968. "That's the true implication of Gemini 4 for Apollo," said Shea. Original plans called for a landing on the 15th Apollo shot, he explained, but "now we may be able to make an attempt on the fourth, fifth or sixth launch...
...case of the lunar landing that NASA is still planning for 1969, the scientists on the panel believe that the exterior of the returning spacecraft will probably be free of lunar microorganisms. A more likely carrier of moon contamination will be the lunar soil and rock that the astronauts are planning to bring back with them. More than 40 universities and other scientific institutions have already asked for samples of this fascinating material, but the panel thinks their pleas should be rejected. It insists that the potentially dangerous moonstuff must be carried in germtight containers and must be stored when...
With modest fanfare, last week the Russians launched their first space shot aimed at landing an unmanned vehicle softly on the moon. After a successful mid-course correction of trajectory, Tass announced that the spacecraft Lunik V was expected to touch down on the lunar plain called the Sea of Clouds at 10:15 p.m. Moscow time. And there were proud hints that this time the flight might not end in the destructive crash that has marked all previous Russian and U.S. moon shots...
...space engineer would blame them for failing on the first try. The U.S. Surveyor program, which is working toward the same soft-landing goal, will fire at least four test shots starting next fall, before even trying to land a scientific pay load equipped to radio information from the lunar surface. It is likely that the Russians are making the same gradual approach...
...even after this improvement, the new lunar calculations did not picture the moon behaving as expected. The plane of its orbit around the earth intersects the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun at points (nodes) that move through 360° about six times per century. The chief cause of this lunar shift is the pull of the sun's gravitation, but there are other influences too, and when all the known effects had been cranked into the equations, a discrepancy of 25 sec. of arc (.007°) per century still persisted...