Word: orbit
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that instant last week, the U.S. launched its biggest satellite. Roaring into near perfect orbit around the earth went Midas II, weighing 5,000 Ibs. with a 3,600-lb. instrument package. But Midas was more than a mere heavyweight monster. It was alive and alert, and in its nose was its reason for being: an infra-red sensor able to detect unusual sources of heat on earth or high in the atmosphere-and thus, by spotting exhaust flames, to give the U.S. warning of hostile missiles streaking toward it from distant lands...
Last week's Midas (for Missile Defense Alarm System) was an experimental model, and its orbit was carefully planned so as not to pass over the Soviet Union. After two days, it lost radio contact with earth. But even in its silence it spun through the sky as the prototype of a complete Midas system, scheduled for operation in 1963, that in its ability to sound an alarm and to summon retaliatory forces, should become a new and powerful deterrent against surprise attack. And most of all, Midas II was a dramatic symbol of the U.S.'s successful...
...after the launching, a moon-watch team at Sacramento, Calif, reported that the spaceship had apparently separated into three parts. Soon Air Force and Smithsonian trackers at Cambridge, Mass. concluded that the spacecraft had thrown off small parts, perhaps seven in all, and was on a new and higher orbit whose apogee (high point) had risen from 208.6 miles to 418.5 miles above the earth...
...forward-pointing retrorocket to reduce its speed. If this is done properly, the satellite will curve down into the denser air, where it will be slowed further by friction. If the retrorocket is fired in the wrong direction, it will speed the satellite up and put it on an orbit with a higher apogee. The U.S. Air Force Discoverer satellite program has suffered from just such aiming errors...
...fraction of cloud, mostly made up of hard-to-ionize elements, stopped near the orbit of Venus (67 million miles from the sun). As it cooled off, some of its material condensed into dust. The dust grains grew bigger and bigger by attracting each other, and they finally coalesced to form three planets: Mercury, Venus and Earth. Another fraction of the cosmic cloud stopped farther away from the sun, forming Mars and the moon. Since these two zones of planet formation overlapped, the earth was able to capture the moon as its satellite. The big outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus...