Word: orbit
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Navigational data that the astronauts gathered will help NASA scientists plot Apollo's orbit more precisely than they could by tracking it from earth. Once the rises and dips in Apollo's orbital path have been identified, the scientists will be able to map their cause: variations in the lunar gravitational field believed to be caused by concentrations of massive material beneath some craters and seas. With better knowledge of the gravitational field, NASA will be able to plan more accurately the paths of future landing missions, on which errors of only a few feet could be dangerous...
Apollo 8's unblemished success and its safe return prompted Air Force Lieut. General Samuel Phillips, the Apollo program director, to announce that Apollo 9 had been scheduled for a Feb. 28 launch date. On that flight, a three-man team headed by Astronaut James Mc-Divitt will orbit the earth and practice rendezvous and docking with the problem-plagued Lunar Module (LM), which has not yet been tested in manned flight...
...earned a reputation of being reserved and distant. He is not a humorous man, nor one given to poetic fantasies. Yet last week he was as thrilled as any of his five children by the feat of Apollo 8. "I looked at the moon after Apollo 8 went into orbit," he says. "It looked different...
...engine failed to ignite, or burned too briefly during the attempt to place Apollo into lunar orbit, the spacecraft would have looped around the back of the moon and headed directly back toward earth. If the engine had cut off during one crucial 30-second interval of the scheduled burn, Apollo would have been left in an unstable orbit and crashed into the surface of the moon. And, if the astronauts had not succeeded in restarting the engine after orbiting the moon, they would have been left stranded in space without hope of rescue. This point was not lost...
...magic visitors. "The Globolinks I've thought up for the unsentimental children of the new generation," he says. He also designed it as total theater. Menotti enlisted the aid of Kinetic Sculptor Nicolas Schoffer and avant-garde Choreographer Alwin Nikolais to place The Globolinks in the proper visual orbit. Schoffer designed the production as a Now Generation light show, employing spotlights, slide projectors and blinking flashbulbs. He provided a continuous flow of color patterns that alternately suggested cityscapes, outer space, subterranean depths. Nikolais devised a series of sliding movements for The Globolinks that suggested weightlessness, and also designed their...