Word: onboard
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...made its rendezvous with Mars late last week. Precisely on schedule, the 1,300-lb. U.S. Mariner 9 fired its retrorocket and went into a looping orbit around the red planet, swinging as close as 800 miles to the Martian surface. With that successful maneuver, controlled entirely by its onboard computer, the $76.8 million windmill-shaped robot became the first man-made satellite of another planet. As pictures of the dust-obscured Martian surface began reaching earth, delighted mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Calif., reported that Mariner's twin TV cameras and ultraviolet and infra...
...entry in the Martian sweepstakes-a 1,300-lb. windmill-shaped instrument package called Mariner 9-will begin a series of crucial maneuvers. Acting on preprogrammed commands sent from the huge, 210-ft. Goldstone tracking antenna in California's Mojave Desert, Mariner's onboard computer will ignite the spacecraft's small liquid-fuel engine for a precise 15-minute "burn," reducing the ship's velocity from about 11,000 m.p.h. to just over 8,000 m.p.h. As it slows down, Mariner will be captured by Martian gravity, thereby becoming the first man-made object...
Inscrutable Joys. Both trains and planes are kept wondrously neat, onboard food is excellent, the supply of hot tea is endless, and ticket prices are reasonable. Loudspeakers, however, relentlessly blare selections from the Mao-glorifying "The East Is Red" or the equally ear-splitting "Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman." (Three guesses as to who the helmsman happens...
...more electric motors drive each of the eight spoked wheels independently. Like a remote-controlled toy car, it is steered by radio signals from earth, where monitors are able to see the terrain in front, behind and to the side of the rover in pictures transmitted from onboard TV cameras. To avert disabling accidents, Lunokhod has a number of safety features. It can, for instance, shut itself off if it begins to list dangerously, or if one of its wheels becomes stuck in a lunar rut. If the wheel cannot be worked free, the ground controllers can fire a small...
...lunar soil, turned to photograph the mother ship, climbed up an incline and crossed a small crater. The robot also displayed impressive scientific skills. Like Luna 16, it carries a device to gouge out samples of lunar soil. It also has the capacity to analyze samples -with an onboard X-ray spectrometer -and report the findings to earth. In addition, it can detect cosmic rays, stomp on the ground to test its rigidity and-speculates Heinz Kaminski of West Germany's Bochum Observatory, where the radio transmissions from Russian space shots are carefully monitored -take three-dimensional pictures...