Word: orbit
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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That light was labeled ".05G"-indicating that the gravity pull on Cooper's capsule had built up to five one-hundredths of ground-level gravity force. The light should have blinked on only after Cooper's three retrorockets had been fired, nudging the capsule out of orbit. If working properly, the light would also mean that the autopilot system was set to start the capsule rolling slowly. The roll, imparting a corkscrew motion as the capsule bores into the atmosphere, would produce a smoother reentry...
...Cooper somehow slipped out of orbit? No. The Hawaii tracking station assured him that his position was proper. Was the light then merely faulty? Or had the autopilot re-entry circuit been triggered out of its normal sequence? On his 20th orbit, he was advised to switch to autopilot-and the capsule began to roll. He then knew that once he reached the .05G level on reentry, his autopilot would take over...
...physical checks on the Kearsarge, Gordon Cooper displayed a momentary dizziness upon stepping out onto the deck after 34 hours and 20 minutes of weightless flight through 22 orbits-a space trip surpassed only by the 64-and 48-orbit tandem missions of Soviet Cosmonauts Andrian Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich last August. He had lost 7 Ibs. since his Canaveral liftoff, and in his dehydrated state, he gulped down four glasses of pineapple juice and six glasses of milk...
...Alfven's theory reaches back to a time when the moon was not yet a satellite of earth, when it soared around the sun like any other planet on its own independent orbit. Trouble was, its orbit took the moon near its large neighbor, the earth. In Icarus, International Journal of the Solar System, Alfven suggests that eventually the moon ventured too close and was captured by the earth's gravity...
Strange Discrepancy. That far, the theory is disarmingly simple. But astronomers can calculate the new orbit of such a recent captive, and the moon does not move along the expected path. Instead of curving along an eccentric ellipse far out into space and then close to earth again, the moon moves along a mildly deformed circle. Such a course would be explainable for a satellite that was moving in the opposite direction from the earth's rotation at the time it was captured. But the moon now revolves in the same direction, and to prove his theory correct...