Word: orbital
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Suddenly a Sparrow. The first encounter took place just north of Hanoi as four Air Force F-4C Phantom II jetfighters, flying "CAP" (Combat Air Patrol) for a bombing strike on the Bac Giang bridge linking Hanoi with China, headed down to their orbit area. At 18,000 feet they picked up "bogies" on their radar, and wheeled to intercept them. Within minutes they spotted six MIG-175 flying level in close formation below them. The MIGs jettisoned their external gas tanks, split up, and with cannons winking, climbed to meet the Phantoms' attack...
...magnetic tail once a month. The passage, which takes two or three days, occurs around the time when the moon is full, on the opposite side of the earth from the sun. Because the moon was full on April 5, only two days after Luna 10 went into lunar orbit, the Russians presumably detected an almost immediate rise in the number of electrons, then a sharp drop-off a few days later as the moon passed out of the tail...
Still another effort, which is perhaps the most delicate and sophisticated relativity check yet designed, will even involve NASA's growing capability in space. Within the next few years, if all goes well, a satellite will be launched into a 500-mile-high polar orbit. It will carry a virtually perfect gyroscope-one that is almost completely free from friction, gravitational pull or magnetic fields. If the general relativity theory is correct, according to calculations made by Stanford University Physicist Leonard Schiff, the gyroscope should precess-change the direction of its axis of rotation-about 1/500th of a degree...
...free from all friction. The gyroscope container will be kept in a bath of liquid helium at a temperature of-452°F. to make the niobium coating superconducting. In this supercooled state it will shield the gyroscope from the effects of any external magnetic field. Once in orbit, the free-spinning gyroscope will also be weightless and almost completely free of gravitational pull...
Huguenin hopes that this test vehicle, to be called Probe I, will be sent up near the end of this year. It will not orbit the earth, and its flight will last for only 30 minutes, he said. The test vehicle will include one of the two antennas planned for Pilgrim and two of the three spectrometers. Probe I will be launched from a NASA base in Virginia...