Word: orbiteer
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...Union, by fateful inadvertency, have ex ploded superbombs at almost exactly the same moment - one near the South Pole, one near the North Pole. The geostrophic jolt, statesmen grimly reveal, has knocked the earth 11° off its axis and, what is in finitely worse, has steeply deflected its orbit. In four months, scientists estimate, the earth will pass so close to the sun that the world will end in fire, and humanity will roast in a hell of its own making...
...Dicke does not propose to use any ordinary gravitational clock, such as a clock with a pendulum. He thinks that an earth satellite can be made to move in such a way that gas drag and light pressure will not affect its orbit. Such a satellite will, in effect, be a gravitational clock, its period of revolution around the earth governed by gravitational pull...
...center of the drum is a semicircular "sail" covered on one side with solar cells to make electric power out of sunlight. While OSO was getting its final push from the launching rocket's third stage, both drum and sail were spinning rapidly. After it was fully in orbit, three arms carrying spherical tanks of high-pressure nitrogen swung outward, and small nitrogen jets reduced the spin to a steady 30 r.p.m...
...more eyes (electrical light sensors ) than any spider. When it went into orbit, some of the eyes searched for the sun. and nitrogen discharged from a bottle in the drum moved the drum's axis until it was perpendicular to the sun's direction. Next, a motor on the central shaft started turning the sail so that its solar cells pointed steadily...
Send on Signal. Other instruments mounted on the drum record radiation from both sun and sky as the drum spins, and a neutron counter catches neutrons bounced up from the earth's atmosphere by the impact of cosmic rays. All the readings are recorded on tape during each orbit. When OSO passes over a Minitrack radio station, it is given a signal that makes the tape reverse its motion and quickly send its data down to earth...