Word: orbit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Three weeks ago, headlines announced that the U.S. had detected a mysterious "dark" satellite wheeling overhead on a regular orbit. There was nervous speculation that it might be a surveillance satellite launched by the Russians, and it brought the uneasy sensation that the U.S. did not know what was going on over its own head. But last week the Department of Defense proudly announced that the satellite had been identified. It was a space derelict, the remains of an Air Force Discoverer satellite that had gone astray. The dark satellite was the first object to demonstrate the effectiveness...
...Dark Fence detected two passes of what seemed to be an unknown space object. After detecting several passes during the following days, Captain W. E. Berg, commanding officer of Dark Fence, decided that something was circling overhead on a roughly polar orbit. He raced to the Pentagon and in person reported the menacing stranger to Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke. Within minutes the news was communicated to President Eisenhower and marked top secret...
Silently tumbling in a near-Polar orbit last week was a mysterious object described as a spook satellite. Spotted by Navy radio space scanners, it is 19 ft. by 5 ft., and ranges in its orbit from an apogee of 1,074 miles to a perigee of 134 miles. The Soviets declared it was not one of theirs. U.S. spacemen said it was not one of theirs. Was it an enemy's "seeing-eye" space station (as retired Army Lieut. General James Gavin darkly suggested), or a curious visitor from outer space? No one knew for sure. Best guess...
First-graders could grasp only qualitative ideas, but Karplus' second-level curriculum (second, third, fourth grades) introduced numbered quantities through use of such devices as rubber-band scales made in class by the pupils. By the sixth grade, the children were innocently testing the influence of orbit size on centrifugal force...
...Force Discoverer satellite failed to orbit (because malfunctioning ground gear cut off its in-flight power 15 seconds too soon). Discoverer's record in nine tries: six orbits, three misses (all due to ground equipment lapses). ¶The Saturn cluster engine, with an awesome 1,500,000 pounds of thrust, was earmarked for another $90 million in 1961 budget cash, lifting it to a fat $230 million for the year. The Saturn will shake through its first ground tests at Huntsville, Ala. in April, when Rocketeer Wernher von Braun will switch on two of its engines; later tests will...