Word: orbiteer
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...haze hung over Pasadena last week, but at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory there was much less concern about the local weather than about conditions on Mars, some 80 million miles away. As scientists monitored the pictures and scientific data being transmitted from Mariner 9, in its second week in orbit around the distant planet, Mars was still enshrouded in a raging dust storm. While apparently beginning to subside, the giant duster will probably obscure much of the surface for weeks to come. Faced with the growing possibility that the Martian skies will not clear up completely during Mariner...
After a voyage of more than five months and 248 million miles, the first of a trio of terrestrial ships made its rendezvous with Mars late last week. Precisely on schedule, the 1,300-lb. U.S. Mariner 9 fired its retrorocket and went into a looping orbit around the red planet, swinging as close as 800 miles to the Martian surface. With that successful maneuver, controlled entirely by its onboard computer, the $76.8 million windmill-shaped robot became the first man-made satellite of another planet. As pictures of the dust-obscured Martian surface began reaching earth, delighted mission controllers...
Small Targets. For the time being, however, Mariner 9 was stealing the space show. Even before going into orbit, it took three series of pictures of Mars from distances varying between 535,000 and 70,000 miles, stored the images on tape, and then, on commands from mission control, transmitted them back home (the signals, traveling at the speed of light, took 6½ minutes to reach earth). The early images were somewhat disappointing. Because much of Mars is shrouded by a raging dust storm that began last September, only a few features could be picked out. But the scientists...
...dots in earthbound telescopes. Closeup photographs of Phobos and Deimos (named after the sons of Mars, the Roman god of war) could finally put to rest the imaginative theory of Soviet Astrophysicist I.S. Shklovskii. In an attempt to explain certain peculiarities-now attributed to misinterpretation of data-in the orbit of Phobos. Shklovskii suggested in 1959 that the moonlet might be hollow, possibly a satellite lofted by some long-vanished civilization...
...indeed seductive: an Eternal City, according to the cliché, insinuating its spirit of timelessness into those who visit it. That attribute may be unfortunate for Roman Catholic churchmen. For while one can stand in Rome, innocently confident that the Catholic world still spins around the Vatican in reverent orbit, the facts are different. There are times when the center cannot hold, as Yeats said. Most especially it cannot hold when it is the center of an institution that fails to comprehend -or merely ignores-the centrifugal forces that are tearing at its edges. It is just that lack...