Word: orbit
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...except one. It came from a 94.8-lb. paddle-wheeled ball that last week rose from the surface of the earth and vaulted through space. The destiny of Pioneer V lay in the unknown void-as far as 186 million miles away-in a 527 million-mile sun-circling orbit between the earth and Venus (see SCIENCE). And of all the machinery thrown into the heavens since the space age began only 29 months ago, Pioneer V alone has a voice that will thunder through history. On earth, scientists press buttons that ask questions, and Pioneer V will deliver...
Slower Is Closer. To shoot at Venus or its orbit, a probe must be shot in the opposite direction to the motion of the earth on its orbit around the sun. Most of its speed will be expended in pulling away from the earth's gravitation. Any speed left over will be subtracted from the orbital speed (66,600 m.p.h.) that the probe had-as every mountain, building and man has-as part of the earth. Left behind in space with reduced speed, the probe will curve inward toward...
...falls, it will pick up speed from the sun's gravitational field and will creep ahead of the earth. After a while, it will be moving fast enough to stop falling and to maintain itself in an eccentric solar orbit. The more backward speed the probe has when it clears the earth, the slower it will be moving around the sun and the farther it will fall toward the sun before it goes into a solar orbit. To fall all the way to Venus, whose orbit is 25 million miles inside the earth's, a probe would have...
Pioneer V did not attain quite this speed, missing it by about 150 m.p.h. So instead of intersecting the orbit of Venus, it will stay about 7,500,000 miles outside. During each of its trips around the sun, which will take 311 days, Pioneer V will swing outward toward the earth's orbit. But only very rarely will the earth be there to meet it. NASA scientists estimate that at least 100,000 years may have to pass before Pioneer V gets close enough to the earth to burn up in its atmosphere...
Wilson's Ripper is Austin Nunne, a Baudelairean esthete and homosexual sadist. Into his orbit drifts a would-be writer named Gerard Sorme, drawn to Nunne partly out of satanic excitement and partly because he seems to share the same ideas about what makes life not worth living. (Sorme is working on a book on "the modern sense of dispossession" that sounds remarkably like Wilson's Outsider.) With the help of "a Mozart symphony, a hot frankfurter sausage, the smell of acetone," Gerard sometimes gets "a new grip on being alive...