Word: marsward
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...past decade has been something of a Martian era of space exploration. Since 1996, the U.S. alone has launched no fewer than nine spacecraft Marsward, and seven have arrived in one piece--an extraordinary success rate for a planet that historically had been a bit of a graveyard of failed missions. Currently, six ships--five American and one European--are at work on Mars, and a handful of others sleep peacefully on the surface or orbit silently above, their missions completed and their systems exhausted. While a lot of the work the spacecraft do is the quiet business of spelunking...
...show. In September the Mars Global Surveyor, already en route to the planet, will settle into orbit and begin a two-year program of photographing and mapping the terrain below. Over the next eight years, up to eight more ships will follow. As these new probes are heading Marsward, others will be dispatched to places as familiar as the moon and as remote as Pluto. "In the next 10 years," says NASA administrator Daniel Goldin, "we'll be flying by, orbiting, landing, roving and bringing back samples from every critical planetary body in the solar system." In the wake...
...machines wink out, however, Mars is unlikely to remain unattended. On Sept. 12, Global Surveyor, another robot probe, will arrive at the planet, settle into a 250-mile-high orbit and begin two years of mapping the surface. A second lander-and-orbiter pair is set to be dispatched Marsward in 1998, with more to follow roughly every other year until 2004. Finally, in 2005, the program will culminate in a first-ever round trip: a probe that lands on Mars and flies back home, carrying a bit of local soil with...
...group of radio engineers trying to tune in Mars heard signals which they claimed they could not identify with an Earthly source. Last week, with Mars closer to the Earth than at any time since 1924, another group of radio engineers tried a more daring experiment: sending a signal Marsward in the hope that it would be reflected back, picked up again on Earth. They thought they might succeed if: 1) the signal could penetrate the ionosphere, the ionized layer in the Earth's atmosphere whose influence on radio waves is not thoroughly understood; 2) it was not dissipated...
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