Word: orbited
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When Soviet Cosmos 954 naval reconnaissance satellite plummeted from its orbit and disintegrated over northwestern Canada last week, it underscored an inescapable fact of the space age: we are never alone. Nor, for that matter, is the other side. Day and night, little is hidden from the intelligence-gathering techniques of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Information is plucked from space, from the ground, from under the sea. A rundown of some of the most sophisticated methods for gathering data...
Last week the Soviet team had callers. From the fog-shrouded space station at Tyuratam, Kazakhstan, two more cosmonauts were launched into orbit aboard Soyuz 27. They were Air Force Lieut. Colonel Vladimir Dzhanibekov, 35, a pilot who is making his first space flight, and Oleg Makarov, 44, his civilian flight engineer whose two previous Soyuz missions included a flight that was aborted and forced to land in the snows of Siberia near the Chinese border in 1975. After chasing the blinking red and blue lights of Salyut round the earth for a day, the cosmonauts caught up with...
...five days on various experiments, Tass said. Then the two newcomers would return to earth early this week. They would leave behind Soyuz 26's Yuri Romanenko, 33, and Georgi Grechko, 46, to continue endurance tests and perhaps to break the U.S. astronaut record of 84 days in orbit. If all goes according to plan, the Soviets will have shown that they can keep a permanent observatory in the sky, staffed by relays of spaceships bringing up fresh supplies and personnel. By contrast, during the U.S.'s comparable Skylab missions in 1973 and 1974, no more than...
...black void. Apollo 9 Astronaut Russell Schweickart has a somewhat different view. In an interview in Co-Evolution Quarterly, a magazine devoted to ecology, Schweickart says, among other things, that perhaps the most beautiful sight in space is a urine dump. A urine dump? It seems that when orbiting astronauts release into space their voided urine, the liquid instantly freezes into millions of tiny ice crystals, which form a hemisphere and spray out in all directions from the exit nozzle. The same thing would happen to ordinary water, but none is ever dumped; it is all recycled through the spacecraft...
Kowal's observations indicate the object is between 160 and 640 kilometers (100 and 400 miles) in diameter-larger than most of the asteroids that orbit between Mars and Jupiter, but far tinier than the smallest of the nine planets, Mercury. It orbits the sun in the same plane as the planets and is currently about 1.5 billion miles from earth. Depending upon whether its orbital path is nearly circular or highly elliptical, the object could take anywhere from 60 to several hundred years to complete a single circuit...