Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...mission that would have fired the public imagination and severely tested NASA's engineering ingenuity: an eleven-year flight to the very edge of the solar system. On one "Grand Tour," the spaceship would have swooped by Jupiter and with a whiplike assist from that planet's powerful gravitational field, flown past the ringed Saturn and finally Pluto, the outermost planet. In another version, the spacecraft would have used a similar "gravity assist" from Jupiter to swing by Uranus and Neptune instead of Pluto. Scheduled for the late 1970s, the Grand Tours would literally have been once...
...Planet. Frustrated scientists and controllers at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory began to despair that their spacecraft would ever fulfill its primary mission: mapping the surface of Mars. But by mid-January the Martian skies had cleared, and Mariner began sending back detailed pictures. Last week NASA released the latest group of Mariner photographs. Transmitted across more than 100 million miles of space and clarified with the aid of a computer, they provided spectacular evidence that Mariner's mission has been a stunning success...
...conferences," the experts assembled this year were unusually reticent about advancing new theories on the moon's evolution. Said Geochemist Paul Cast, chief lunar scientist at the Manned Spacecraft Center: "We have so much data to examine that the boys just aren't doing much speculating." Added NASA Geochemist Robin Brett: "The Apollo 15 material alone will keep us busy for about five years...
...will not be easy for NASA and its major contractors to meet the tentative target date (1978) for the first flight. There is considerable opposition in Congress to expensive new space ventures, and there are also formidable engineering problems. Initially, NASA hoped to build a piggyback shuttle system in which both the passenger vehicle and launching rocket could be piloted back to earth (TIME, June 22, 1970). But combining the characteristics of a rocket ship and a jet plane in both craft would be extremely costly. Now NASA will probably settle for a less sophisticated design...
...NASA last week ordered a month's delay, until April 16, in the St. Patrick's Day launch of Apollo 16, citing problems with the astronauts' suits, the emergency jettison system and a battery in the lunar lander...