Word: orbiteer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...three-man moon crew had been aboard, they would still have been safe enough. The makeshift maneuvers successfully inserted the third stage and the unmanned Apollo 6 spacecraft into a 218-mile by 113-mile elliptical orbit (instead of the planned 115-mile circular orbit). But there was more trouble to come...
Mysterious Breakup. When controllers ordered the third-stage engine to restart-in an effort to shove it from its parking orbit to a distance of 320,000 miles on a simulated moon trip- nothing happened. Still attempting to salvage the mission, the controllers next separated Apollo 6 from the dead third stage and used the spacecraft's engine to push it to an altitude of 13 822 miles. From that height, it plunged back into the atmosphere and parachuted to a safe landing and recovery in the Pacific Ocean. Later, NASA reported the orbiting third stage mysteriously broke into...
Died. Colonel Yuri A. Gagarin, 34, Soviet cosmonaut, who on April 12, 1964 became the first man in space with a one-orbit flight aboard Vostok I; in the crash of an unannounced type of plane, also killing Colonel Vladimir S. Seryogin, 46; near Moscow. Short (5 ft. 3 in.) and stocky, the son of a rural carpenter, Gagarin won his pilot's wings in 1957, the year of the Sputnik, shortly after was tapped for the first class of cosmonauts. His historic 89-minute orbit of the globe made him Russia's greatest hero since World...
...natural phenomenon," says Astronomer Hewish. "It would be stretching the imagination too far for all of them to be generated by intelligent beings." The Mullard team searched in vain for slight changes in signal frequency that would indicate it came from a planet or a double star system; in orbit around a star, for example, a planetary transmitter would alternately approach and recede from the earth, producing a Doppler effect that would first increase and then decrease the frequency of its signal...
Continuous Spin. Oyama's longevity findings were an unexpected byproduct of experiments to learn something about the effects of prolonged space travel upon astronauts, who will soon be spending months in orbit under conditions of weightlessness, and exploring the moon, which has only one-sixth of earth's gravity. Reduced gravity over so long a period of time, space scientists fear, may produce effects that did not emerge during the relatively short manned space flights made to date...