Word: meteoroid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Martian atmosphere. JPL technicians explained that the spectrometer, which should be cooled to below - 400° F. to operate efficiently, refused to chill at all. Mariner 7 caused even greater concern at Mission Control when it went off the air entirely for seven hours. Apparently struck by a tiny meteoroid, the spacecraft lost its fix on the star Canopus and its directional antenna spun away from earth. A new roll-and-search command went up from Pasadena. Mariner 7 obeyed, and though performing at less than capacity, its radio functioned again...
...phase of earthly life has profited more than medicine. By adapting the compact electronic equipment designed to monitor the life functions of space travelers, doctors are now able to watch a wardful of seriously ill patients from afar. By modifying a meteoroid sensor, they can detect minute body tremors caused by such neurological disorders as Parkinson's disease. Another adaptation involves the so-called "sign switch": intended to be actuated by the mere movement of an astronaut's eyes so that his hands will be free, it has already been installed in a motorized wheelchair for paraplegics...
...whiskers sprout from both ends of the break. In a few days, the whiskers can bridge a gap one millimeter wide (about one twenty-fifth of an inch) and carry one watt of electrical power-enough for most of the delicate circuitry in modern spacecraft. Collision with a sizable meteoroid might result in damage too extensive for whisker therapy, admits Minneapolis-Honeywell Physicist William Jarnagin, who led the team that developed the alloy. But that hardly matters, he adds somberly. "Everything would go then...
Cosmic Dust. This reassuring news was delivered to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration with the authority of a firsthand report. For seven months, the satellite Explorer XVI orbited earth, inviting meteoroids to hit the instruments that encrusted most of its surface. There were cylinders of thin sheet metal containing helium gas that escaped when they were punctured by a meteoroid. There were instruments that gave an electrical signal when sunlight showed through a puncture hole in plastic film. There were also sensitive microphones that registered 15,000 occasions when something hit them hard enough to make them vibrate...
Only at rare intervals, though, did Explorer XVI collide with anything bigger than a microscopic bit of cosmic dust. There were 44 meteoroids that succeeded in penetrating a sheet of beryllium-copper one-thousandth of an inch thick, which is slightly thicker than household aluminum foil. The most powerful meteoroid encountered knocked a tiny hole in stainless steel three-thousandths of an inch thick. Metal as thick as the wall of a beer can went unpunctured. NASA's tentative conclusion is that the plentiful meteoroids are too small to do harm, and the dangerous ones...