Word: orbit
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Resetting the Clock. Columbia University Astronomer Wallace J. Eckert and Graduate Student H. F. Smith Jr. of IBM's Watson Laboratory at Columbia began by analyzing the moon's orbit with IBM's fast-figuring computers. The moon's position has been observed with precision for 200 years, so there was more than enough data to feed into the machines. After they pondered electronically for several hundred hours, weighing the effects of the earth, sun, planets and relativity on the moon's orbit, the computers reported that in a three-year cycle the moon would...
...even after this improvement, the new lunar calculations did not picture the moon behaving as expected. The plane of its orbit around the earth intersects the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun at points (nodes) that move through 360° about six times per century. The chief cause of this lunar shift is the pull of the sun's gravitation, but there are other influences too, and when all the known effects had been cranked into the equations, a discrepancy of 25 sec. of arc (.007°) per century still persisted...
...trying to puff a little breadth into its pages, the Advocate has gone heavily into orbit. It owes almost all of its prose to Mao Tse-tung, the adolescent Henry Miller, and the Phyllis Anderson Award drama competition. Much of its poetry comes from people outside the College. This wholesale borrowing gives the magazine a good variety of pieces, but some of it seems frivolous, and the table of contents still shows several discouraging vacuums. There is only one short story, one review, and nary a satire or a critical essay...
...Price of Altitude. The great advantage of a satellite on a synchronous orbit like the Early Bird's is its fixed position relative to points on the earth's surface. Ground stations that want to use it as a relay always know where to find it, and a single satellite has enough range to carry TV or telephone conversations among all the countries on both sides of the Atlantic. Three synchronous satellites will cover the entire earth, with the exception of small areas near each of the poles...
When the rocket cleared the atmosphere, the windscreen was jettisoned; the reactor and its conical support section went into orbit 800 miles above the earth. As soon as SNAP's scientists were convinced that the proper orbit had been attained, they sent a signal that told the reflector mechanism to reduce neutron leakage. Slowly the nuclear reaction started; heat built up in the core, and a magnetic pump circulated the metallic coolant at 1020°F. through tubes in the skin of the support structure. The inner ends of 2880 pellets of a germanium-silicon material were heated while...