Word: orbit
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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With 35 U.S. and Soviet satellites having achieved orbit, the worldly-birds have lost some of their gee-whiz excitement. But though the public may be getting jaded, U.S. satellites are just getting really useful. Last week, three years to the day after the Russians launched their era-opening Sputnik I, a U.S. Army communications satellite, launched from Cape Canaveral with little fanfare, went into orbit and calmly began to receive, store and spew back a stream of voice and Teletype messages sent up from the earth. Courier 1B is a 51-in.. 500-lb. sphere containing...
...chance, the Journal's executive managing editor is M. (for Michael) Ogden. Just by chance, Providence's M. Ogden was instrumental last January in dropping Dick Tracy from the Journal for good, after taking offense at a particularly unsanitary Gould creation called Flyface, around whose face flies orbit continually. It was after the Journal's action that Gould introduced felonious Poet Ogden to his readers...
When Echo first took to space on Aug. 12, it was as round and polished as a giant ball bearing, its aluminized Mylar film kept tightly inflated by 20 Ibs. of vaporized anthraquinone, a normally solid organic chemical. When its 100-ft. sphere moved on its orbit 1,000 miles away from the surface of the earth, it covered about one-tenth the angle of the planet Venus at 40 million miles, but it did not show as a disk even in a powerful telescope. The sun reflecting on its spherical surface showed as a mathematical point, as stars...
...shadow of the Earth, but on Aug. 24 it dipped into darkness for two minutes while passing over the U.S. West Coast. Each day its stay in the shadow will increase, until in late December the balloon satellite will be in darkness for 35 minutes of its 118-minute orbit. When it goes into the shadow, it shrinks a bit, but Dr. Jaffe does not know how much...
Echo's orbit has changed very little, but no one can say for sure how long it will last. All its gas pressure is probably gone by now. The only reason it keeps its shape is that the forces that tend to shrink or distort it are extremely small. Slater estimates that meteorites nibble away about 1¼ sq. in. of its skin per day. Eventually the sphere may collapse, pushed to a pancake by air drag and pressure of sunlight, or drawn together by the Mylar's "memory" of the way it was folded in the launching...